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right? Thank you. hi! Everyone thanks very much for coming out this afternoon.

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I want to first of all, acknowledge the country. because this is something that's really important, that I think should be

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done in the United States, for example, and other places too.

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So on behalf of everyone, gathered to pay respect to the spirit of Country Nam. where we are meeting, acknowledged the past and present Coulomb nation.

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war and jury warriors as the sovereign people. Here the cultural knowledge holders who maintain and promote the nam, aboriginal law, customs and custodianship, responsibilities of the country and the people that country continue to sustain generation after generation

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into the future. For all of us I recognize the important contribution that first nations, thinkers have made to sociology, including challenges to our dominant ways of thinking. We thank all first nations delegates in the room today for their contributions to knowledge in the discipline.

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okay.

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it's good. Ps.

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okay, thank you. so I this is going to be.

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I was crushingly disappointed about Brazil 2 years ago when I organized the same panel with the same title in Brazil, in Porto Allegra, and it was such a shame not to go there and actually

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do this there. But instead, we have a different bunch of people. I think there's one person. Andrea Briganti, who is the same, and me at you to 2 people.

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But we have Andrea Briganti and another Andrea as well.

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from the University of Lisbon, and I met Andrea Pavoni actually in Montreal a few weeks ago.

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so am a culture and new algorithmic urban mobilities.

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Then I will be speaking on the future of touch in human robot interactions.

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Then we have Alexian Maddox and nomads. Smith. Along with Justinth Flor and Luke Hemsberg.

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on Senses of In the city, a speculative and sexual exploration of sensory spaces of play in the Dial city, and also for the eagle-eyed amongst you. You will have seen that there was a handout downloadable from the program. Website. Pdf.

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which is fun. I should. That's a good idea.

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Wolver should have done that, actually.

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And then, lastly, Ben Lyell, from Monesh on self-tracking and cyber attacking social media reactions to Garmin's ransom okay, so I'm going to stop sharing this. And hopefully, Andrea Briganti is on the line on zoom.

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andrea mubi brighenti: Yes,

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andrea mubi brighenti: thank you, Mark. Shall I pitch it to 50 min. Is that right?

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Yes, indeed, yes, please.

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andrea mubi brighenti: sorry, said again.

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andrea mubi brighenti: as close to 15 min as you can. I'll be there. I just please consider that I can't see the audience. So I'm just kind of blindfolded talking, and I'm sorry not being able to be there with you, which would have been completely different experience. But you know, life is

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andrea mubi brighenti: complicated. And yeah, but here we are. As you anticipated, I'm presenting a paper that I co-author with Andrup Ofoni with Andrea. We have a an upcoming book that's titled at my culture.

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andrea mubi brighenti: And this is part of the book of the explorations that have led to this book, and we have in particular chapter which I thought was fitting for the session which is about what we call atmosphere navigation, or the relationship between urban mobility and the effective a static per central.

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andrea mubi brighenti: let's say, shaping of of this experiences. So the way of introduction. I would like to say that if we consider more than Orban live we we realize that. And if you look at the number of authors that are, be briefly browsing through, let's say in this 15 min.

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andrea mubi brighenti: W. What? What comes out of powerfully is this idea that modern urban life has created this, this space where the question, the issue and the said, the problem of or orientation, and this orientation comes to the, for it's a kind of space that appears to be like

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andrea mubi brighenti: displaced in a sense. so this gives rise to what we consider to be kind of hold psychopolitics of passions. that's somehow. shape the modern, the modern problem the more than imaginary.

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andrea mubi brighenti: And I'm thinking about feelings such as anxiety, uncertainty, fear

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andrea mubi brighenti: to tackle this passions. then we also see correspondingly,

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andrea mubi brighenti: a whole thread, let's say in urban governance, to sort of try to figure out how to respond to to this problems of the modern subject, and how to provide for

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andrea mubi brighenti: what is needed in terms of Responding to this, this feelings of excite and certain to fear these, let's say sad feelings in the in the spin of this lexicon.

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andrea mubi brighenti: so one particular interesting

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andrea mubi brighenti: topic that comes out of here. Is this a notion of what we call a hodology or transactology? How dos in in Greek? Is the word for way or root. And so projectologies the science of trajectories in the city. How do we move about the city? This is the idea. how do we construct our paths are, are

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andrea mubi brighenti: the mobilities are directions how these are desires negotiated, but also somehow ingrained within space itself.

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andrea mubi brighenti: And so here we consider the idea of atmosphere as a kind of double in the double sense of

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andrea mubi brighenti: the word. It's of course it's a it's it's It's a Mongol word that that brings together this city of atmosphere and capture at Mocato. For us. As to determination, let's say the on the one hand, it is the notion that culture itself becomes atmospheric. It becomes, you know, in ingrained and infused within space, within modern, or the space on the one hand, and on the other the idea that it is

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andrea mubi brighenti: It is the culture of atmospheres in the sense that, increasingly, the the the psychopathics of passions that we're talking about infuses the the space, but also becomes the object of an increase increased. let's say, elaboration and increased debate increase awareness and also sometimes obsession.

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andrea mubi brighenti: So the the the modern technology is promised on the idea to to construct a shape efficient to space an efficient space, a space where efficiency is is enhanced. as can be seen, for instance, in the aberration of urban is by the

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andrea mubi brighenti: in the mid nineteenth century. so so so that space can be somehow controlled. It can be amenable to planning. And all this sort of things.

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andrea mubi brighenti: On the other hand, this creates for the for the urban subject an increase reliance on a set of tools that are the tools that makes space or prepare space for convenient navigation. And some of these tools, increasingly, of course, out the digital tools that we bring in our pockets and

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andrea mubi brighenti: and these are somehow part and parcel all the same, let's say, config atmosphere configuration. So what we are ego to highlight is this? I would say, kind of paradoxical constitution of Alma culture. in the sense that on the one hand, it's attempt is to somehow

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andrea mubi brighenti: this burden, the urban to the urban dweller, this burden, the the the are subject from the need to figure out the complexity of the urban space, and to to to negotiate with all the multi-dimensional and and the new ones, and the and ineffable dimension of this thick at most very city of this thick atmosphere of this thick environment.

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by simplifying, by by sorting out, by selecting, by. Granting, for instance, we've seen recently

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andrea mubi brighenti: the safety that you're gonna go and get granting the safety to the user. there are many apps that not tell you places that are ranked according to their or neighbors that are rank according to their trustability, their their the safety perception, and this and that

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andrea mubi brighenti: and but but, on the other hand, of course, this this we we want to emphasize out somehow this this trend is how systematically undermined by The, the the very way contemporary Microsoft particularly works by that is, by overflowing, providing the user with

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andrea mubi brighenti: with as many data as possible, and by providing the user with as many, let's say, stimulations, as many also perceptual richness in the sense that again, many of these up are trying at the same time to make a navigation as a rich and pleasurable. And and of course, consumption. Or, yeah.

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andrea mubi brighenti: that's possible. So the all this, this and sorry amazing constantly evoked and spurred. And this creates, let's say, this, this central central tension to the what we call the app atmosphere this sort of optimal cultural? let's say, configuration.

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andrea mubi brighenti: So we look at in the in the paper, and then in the book. We look at this sort of genealogy of of authors that are interesting for us in terms of shaping the modern imaginary. Of what mobility in the city is, and how it comes about. Also in terms of it's a psychological, psychosocial or effective

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andrea mubi brighenti: a burden gardens,

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andrea mubi brighenti: And of course we start with with a simple consideration. That's a lived. Space is, in a sense, already always oriented. We don't move in space as if it's just, you know, a neutral space, but we always have, let's say

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andrea mubi brighenti: tasks or or directions, or what the psychologist cur leaving used to call balances for zone's character the toleration, let's say, of certain places are intrinsically for

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andrea mubi brighenti: the the the the subject more appealing, more attractive or more repulsive. And so we have this natural, let's say, negotiation of of attractions and repetition. So the the idea that leaving pioneered is the the idea that the psych itself is built as as this vector space. Let's say, well.

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andrea mubi brighenti: where you know, you have this in Aaron, let's say vectorization of your of your psychic content which eventually translates into your local motor. life. Let's say.

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andrea mubi brighenti: And something similar, of course, can be then, later. Found in other authors. Who that? Most specifically, with the characteristics of of the city?

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andrea mubi brighenti: there are quite a few of them, and I won't be able to mention all of them. But I would just like to recall the very influential American planner, Kevin Lynch, because in Kevin Lynch, and you recall the image of the city work by 1,960. There you have.

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andrea mubi brighenti:  a precisely this. This idea of a major ability of the city and legibility of urban space. And and how is it the lynch somehow

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andrea mubi brighenti: salt, in a way ways to curb? But let's say the the excessiveness of of the wildness, let's say, of public space, all of these authors. Yes, 5 min. Yes, I have. I'm I'm taking my own stop watch here. So I'm I'm pretty aware of the timing. Yes, how?

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andrea mubi brighenti: somehow. Lynch. And we we want to emphasize also the difference between us that and the Kevin Lege.

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andrea mubi brighenti: because you need the phone. Ultimately, the I believe that the notion of let's say traffic management and extended sense in the city becomes. I'm sorry there are. The the church church bells are ringing here. It's 7 30 in the morning. So last time in a Catholic country. so what I was for, sir, that selects a but

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very technical. It's a technocratic, let's say

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andrea mubi brighenti: solution for for the ability that by sort of lashing out all the rich sensorium of the city lynch it somehow wanted to include the subjective experience of the you of the city user. But let's say, to modulate to modulate it into, let's say public space, that that. Be for him that

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andrea mubi brighenti: kind of legible that is in ultimately, that's a kind of optimized

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andrea mubi brighenti: I'll optimize atmosphere.

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andrea mubi brighenti: And so here we also have this notion of somehow that defines for us the

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andrea mubi brighenti: at least the the the the contemporary, let's say urban navigation paradigm. The idea of atmospheric engineering. How is it that we can engineer in in various way Kevin Leach was somehow very close to kind of cybernetic approach to the to the city. they said, Yeah.

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andrea mubi brighenti: feed big circuits that are somehow shape a set of emergent properties in that call us out of encore, the even on coordinated elements. But and they can and you can be somehow oriented. And to conclude, why is this interesting for us, because somehow it's rhymes. And here we tap more into our

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andrea mubi brighenti: It's a philosophical background it taps into a number of authors like the French philosophers. And here we refer to to Judeas in one Don and Julius who had the An interesting collaboration on on the subject and subjectivity. what is subjectivity?

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andrea mubi brighenti: as a type of problem, let's say, oriented or problem solving

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andrea mubi brighenti: enterprise. So subjectivity and the subject but the individual itself. For for Simon Don, every sort of an individual. For Simon Dawn is a kind of problem, solving resolution of a problem that is inherent to a state of tension that exist in the pre individuated state. So the subject prolongs somehow into the

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andrea mubi brighenti: into the biological and then psychosocial for Simon Down domains what is, already a physical reality, individual. That is the process that corresponds to this attempt at solving problems and

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andrea mubi brighenti: with the, with the, with the at at my cultural configuration of modern urban living. we think that somehow, what happens is the kind of this burdening of the of the carbonate from

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andrea mubi brighenti: from the problem, from the problem, this, this, this, this idea that the user, is this burden from the necessity to secure, let's say, immunization safety as a and this and that. But somehow this idea as as as I was saying, suggest that

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andrea mubi brighenti: perhaps a a new, let's say space, for a new politics opens up here, and it is precisely this idea of the right to the problem, do we have the right to

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andrea mubi brighenti: somehow reappropriate the problem. as the the problem solving, let's say as as a task, let's say, of the of the urban it. It's 15 min now that I'm speaking, and so I'll stop here and leave the floor to the other presentation. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm sorry I I don't get the feedback, but back to

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thank you

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hopefully, you can hear a room applauding. So yeah, and especially because of the early morning start that you had as well.

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okay.

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okay, So just as a kind of

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preface to this. the thematic group that this that's running this panel

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and other ones as well.

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 the sense in society. If you have any interest in joining us. we have some elections coming up as well. You can be board members, you can.

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If you want to help and be involved, you know. Just talk to me, or Kelvin or Norman afterwards.

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and thank you to Catherine for sharing this session actually and for time keeping as well.

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So I'm going to start with. this thing, which is A few months ago Elon Musk

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revealed an android robot

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on stage, and it was

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predictably just show

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all show and no substance.

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because the machine couldn't even walk by itself. It had to be carried. If you saw the footage had to be carried by a bunch of engineers from behind the stage to the stage and posed, and so on. I mean, I'm not sure what he was trying to do with it. It was really to fall over, but at any kind of point, really

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but I think it just encapsulates

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the difference between our cultural expectations of what robots should be

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and what they actually are. I mean, most of them are pretty useless.

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Now, this is The touch aspect is part of a larger project. I'm trying to get under way

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in which I look at kind of robot embodiment and difference. So one of the kind of research questions is about

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the cultural historical traditions that have shaped our expectations of

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No. Why are they so white?

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And why are they so gendered as well in certain ways, you know, android robots.

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I also look at other robots which have animal shapes which are kind of non-specific.

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And this

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the question as well, has come up because human robot interaction?

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people like the community which includes engineers, designers, all kinds of things. They have started to look again at the full of non-verbal communications. So haptics, you know. On one hand, it's to with touch. But, on the other hand, it's what to do with.

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This kind of its ongoing role within non-verbal communication, including gesture and also proximity. So the kind of spaces, the mixed spaces of human robot and direction.

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And you know they're trying to do good things like some of these engineers are trying to do things. There's this kind of

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area of robotics that I admitted in called socially assistive robotics, which is trying to help people deal with situations. So those on the autism and spectrum young children, elderly care, and so on.

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So we know about this to some extent, and this is some of the work on the right that I've been

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doing, including a special issue of transactions in human robot interaction.

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But I think this is really the question that I'm asking, really, by asking these other questions. I'm really trying to investigate what touch means for us. If we look at what

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you know how to program, touch within interaction design and make touch more naturalistic, and this thing, especially your social touch.

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right social touching, which is part of nonverbal communication, but also has these other pathways and other ways that we experience touching as well.

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So there are 2 books called Living with robots that will feature in this presentation.

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For some reason it's a popular title. Do Michelle and Damiano. It's a very interesting book, actually, which is quite philosophical.

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And I've been researching touch and haptic technologies for a while.

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and especially how it's been incorporated into machines. And so the Hci human computer interface and Hri human robot interaction

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is have usually only been addressed in one form of touching.

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which is, you know, the cutaneous, the touch on the skin, a feel of surface object services, texture.

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deformation, deformation, not deformation, but deformation. So touch, then, as a discriminative pathway.

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I, through which we detect difference

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based on pressure and location. When and where information

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and this is practical.

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well for decades, the neuroscience of touch has discovered a separate and distinct neural architecture

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through which social or effective touching takes place.

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Technology such as

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artificial hands, Eskin are developing rapidly, and robots are increasingly targeted to domestic and health care tasks. So it's opportune to ask about the role of pro-social touch within human machine interactions. And they're placing what roboticists are starting to call

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artificial empathy. Of course they are, you know, to compare with

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AI so artificial empathy. So

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there are a bunch of people trying to engineer machines to give us the sense that they have empathy.

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This is just, I mean, well, wrong. cool.

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worrying, worrying, but interesting, really interesting.

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So the people like Nuru, Asada, d. Michelle, and Demiano as well. Talk about this, and a bunch of other people as well.

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And what I'm going to do today is just examine

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a few case studies of socially assistive robotics. So it's socially assistive robots, including Huggy Bot 3

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and

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And I'm going to ask, How is social touch being folded into human machine futures. and what historic lessons from experiments in heptic protocols and motor mimicry

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can help us here.

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But a kind of diversion. Really, this is a kind of philosophical diversion.

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Just briefly, because I think you know, we're.

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I think all of us are.

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I think about touch and heptics and machine hamptics in the particular is the engineering of touch which

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I don't know if anybody's tried. One of these kind of desktop devices, the phantom device. Or it's kind of there's a new one. I actually

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out of Canada, actually, which is a desktop device. And it allows you to can feel objects, and I actually tried one out in Montreal a few weeks ago. Which was literally the model of a human mouth with its teeth and various dentist drills. It was a medical simulation

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piece of software and the the arm

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attached to a cutting. drilling device. And you could actually practice it was. It's kind of quite empowering to be on the other side of that. Actually, yeah, for once.

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anyway. the philosophy of touch. So I'm thinking, kind of abstractly about this, because some of you know this tapestry, which is

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yeah yeah, at the Clooney Museum in Paris. Absolutely. And it features in Michelle Sayer and his book, La sang song, The 5 Senses. So Richard Kearney's most recent book touch, recovering our most vital sense.

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goes over some familiar territory. And you know

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those of you who know about the phenomenology of touch.

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For example. Mella Ponti, especially in the Visible and the Invisible, and his essay on Suzanne, I in mind. and I've I've written about this in other publications. But there's another schematic I've been working on.

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which I want to

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just introduce here.

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So at various points in Kerney's book, he seems to summon the spirit of Michel Bar without really crediting him or citing him. There's one footnote in this book.

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And this is concerning the tapestry at Clooney, a pre-modern model of the nervous system for, sir.

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Oh, yeah, yeah, no, this one. It's gonna it's gonna come right now

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that

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Right there you go.

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Yeah, kind of expecting the at the placeholder. Right? So I'll just read this out quickly we seek things with our senses, if they give themselves to us. Whenever I am sensing, I go out to the world and receive from the world in a continuous circle.

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Sight is not touch, and touches not sight.

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but each traverses the other and works through the quote same body and quote the same world. Now he is quoting Meller Ponti there, but he's kind of putting it in a slightly different way than Melliponti actually does.

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because it's a kind of a loop or a circuit model which goes out at traveling out from the body and then to return.

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It's a movement. It's an active form of sensing and

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reporting back on the difference between perceptual states. So in other words, it's a model of discriminative touch.

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So I've written about this. You know the sense of touch back in 2,007. And then more recently in terms of this book, how it became sensory motor

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and the kind of touch

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 think about loops and the spinal cord. So when you think about a top-down section of the spinal cord, there's a kind of loop that goes from the spinal cord out into the peripheral nervous system, and then back to report back on difference. So this model of discriminative pathways.

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so this detection of difference which is at the heart also of the model of the psychophysics

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of an's hydrogen and Faber and Gustav Fechner. they're no way. They're them all right. okay. But accelerate. Okay?

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Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So all that stuff.

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So in other words, active touch. The current touch is not just about skin, but also these other things as well.

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but there's another form. So I said about, you know, looking down on the spinal cord at the bottom. Here. and these are pathways like, it's almost like a figure of 8.

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And we have this other form of touch that's been written about since just before the millennium. So around the 1990 s. a Lausan and a team in Goterberg, in Sweden, discovered this kind of slow touch mechanism, which is a completely different neural pathway.

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And what's interesting is this, you know, if we have this kind of simplified diagram here on the left-hand side, we have the slow nerve fibers and the right-hand side. The fast nerves are the discriminative pathways, and the slow nerves are these more so that it leads to the effective touch but hypothesis.

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or sometimes called by India, Morrison, actually, who's very interesting neuroscientist who's very engaged in social science and social psychology and the humanities as well. Actually, she's writing about kind of touch and buffering and stress, and so on. India, Morrison, the social touch hypothesis, too.

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But actually, this isn't new, and this is one of the things that I've been working on recently. This German.

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a neurologist, Otfried Firster, who actually found out in 1,932 with his team.

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This association between this pointer and thealamic tract and effective touch, but it was kind of forgotten in the literature back, you know, until the 1,900 ninetys.

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Yeah. So there's internal bodily states

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here. Right? So this takes it's a role. Okay, I better just speed up. Okay? So from the haptic loop, that kind of discriminative but also social touch. So there's 2 loops there and then an effective loop. So if we think about kind of artificial empathy and the production of our but empathy. If we're going to go there, then we know that with some of these robotics. This is a very crude robot! Right? It's cog!

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So there's Cog and Kismet at Mit back in the 1,900 ninetys.

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and of course, famously. Cynthia Brazil, at Mit, wrote about her own experience on knowing full well that this was a bunch of machinic parts, but also that the eyes followed her around the room. There was, you know, it's a basic emotion being communicated which made her feel

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as though there was some kind of empathic connection. So I'm talking about the production of effective loops here

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and Christina Hooke, or Who a Ho! I'm not sure how to announce that 2 sets of analysis. Very confusing.

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Yeah, she's with about this as well.

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Okay.

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The other book called Living with Robots. Ruth Aylett and Patricia Vargas, and with Alet is a terrier. What universe in Edinburgh, where I'm living at the moment?

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So I just want to build up to something which is a case study. Not that one.

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this one.

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Okay. Now it's going to hopefully loom at you. Yes, slowly coming out of the screen towards you.

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Okay, now, the whole thing with this one is that this is at Max Planck Institute, in Stuart, Alexis Block and Katherine Kookenbecker, who have been working on this. This is, how about 2? But there was actually huggy about 3 right now, and what it does is it has a kinect up the top, which is ir, sensing

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proximity, and it develops a an algorithm for each user that it interacts with. So it

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produces hugs. You step up to it. It will say, please give me a hug, and then the user will step up and it will wrap its arms around you. Now it's rather crudely covered in

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soft materials, because obviously, it's a hard plastic, the usual type of thing of a robot and then it will learn from each individual user and develop a repertoire of what they call intra-hug gestures

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that you know within the hug. Because if you say to an engineer, well, just have a hugging robot.

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hugs and handshakes are really complex social things. Right? Yeah, it's very difficult to to program.

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So I'm going to just show you.

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Oh, I'm not going to show you that.

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Yeah, I'll just yeah. I just conclude, right? Thank you. Okay, So on the one hand, you know, when we think about touch, we think about. Maybe, you know, usually engineers are thinking about discriminative touch. But there's clearly something going on in terms of effective touch or social touch. These slow pathways.

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which I think is really important for inviting the user in to proximity to interaction, and so on. And if if engineers and designers want to have these robots

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in our homes in care homes to do this kind of work of social assistance.

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then I think they need to develop more than just these quite scary. hug robots, which is also wearing a a dress right? And socks on his hands. But I think you know, for social scientists. Again, we can ask this question about, you know the so the future of touch. Well, using these robotic platforms as ways to think about touch and machinery touch and how to feed back into the design process as well. And I'm going to finish there with an image of a fluffy robot.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Yeah.

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on these. Okay.

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Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here for this session. Great session. By the way.

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today, Nam and I would like to present on just some speculative work that we're doing about thinking about sensory environments in the city.

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So to kind of get you into the mood, I just thought that I would just read you a little piece that I wrote. That is a part of, I guess the inspiration from the way that I've started thinking about the augmentation of the senses.

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Yesterday it rained a torrent, leaving puddles in the streets and overflowing gutters.

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My shoes got wet. so did the rest of me.

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cold and soggy, I made my way up the streets, shaking my head at my lack of forethought to pack my umbrella.

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It's yellow, a bright slash amongst the concrete.

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A colorful exclamation, Mark!

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The city is experiential looming, and I moved through it, my hat dripping one of the many the hoy poly.

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So today, we're just going to share the mic and talk you through some of the ways that we're starting to think about immersive environments, censoring environments and pleasure and play in the city.

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So I'll just cover off a couple of things.

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and some of the what we'd like to kind of. I guess foreground is the idea of the city as a mixed reality, environment so very basic

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thinking about play within the built environment of the city, from physical space to code. Also the visceralities and socialities are the ephemeral moment and the social ethanescence that arise

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through these instances, moments and encounters, we

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experience intimacy

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as forms of playful engagement in the city.

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So it's also about navigating these environments in playful and ad hoc ways. So you're kind of here as work through those ideas as we go.

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So we brought, we draw on a broad range of scholarship and across the work, for example, you know, smart cities, digital cities and creative cities. So just there's a lot of scholarship that kind of crosses over for us into here. And also the obvious ones are digital media scholars and the urban geographers.

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We also draw conceptually on scholarship, articulating the social value of play within place, and the types of social cohesion that might arise within these immersive and playful spaces.

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So just to get you started, we thought we'd talk about the environment first. and so I'll do one part, and then I'll call me a to do the next.

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So for us, the digital city is characterized as a central built environment that is both material and digital

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in it. There are a range of existing and emerging technologies that we deploy, for example, smartphones and headsets

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that will mediate our interactions with immersive environments in the city.

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These sensory environments of the city are on a continuum ranging from the fully immersive experiences through to the in a holy artificial world.

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through to the incorporation of some elements of an artificial world into the real world to add information so overlays. And I think most of us are seeing the overlay space as being where we're really starting from for immersive realities.

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So also, we'd like to pull forward the embodied experience of the city

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and thinking about it within a mixed reality environment. And so that's quite central. So for us, talking about immersive and sensory is is also about foregrounding the body in digital and physical space.

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Other aspects that we do draw on, and if you do feel like downloading our work and progress paper, you'll see that we also think about the metaverse as an interoperable digital commons, and the rise of generative AI within social creativity. So that kind of creativity in play has a bit of an overlap for us

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not an entirely seamless handoff, but not the worst one ever so cities are already being augmented in really interesting ways that are built into kind of the logics of capital that we see emerging

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in city spaces. So Banks's recent book, The City Authentic kind of Highlights. This And he draws on a history of urban planning, beginning with the City beautiful, moving to the city efficient.

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And now he argues to the city, authentic to call attention to the way that cities have always been shaped by capitalist logics of attention and money and digital platforms have become fundamentally

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intertwined with the development of contemporary cities. So we see this in the aestheticisation of urban renewal projects where they become about the visual aesthetic engagement with the city, and not necessarily about any kind of authentic. reconnection or reimagining of the past.

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So the city is interacted with by its residents, by visitors, both in this material and digital sense, and sometimes they don't actually meet. Very well. The aesthetic representation jars with the embodied experience of being in that space.

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So Banks's concern here is that digital platforms, and this level of augmentation in the cityscape is turning urban spaces into inauthentic spectacles that are in some ways alienated from their own history and their own residents.

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So that is a kind of depressing note. But I'll I'll hand over to Alexia, who's going to now highlight some of the playful possibilities that we can find in cities.

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So obviously, we wanted to think about how you can. Imagine immersive spaces that are not just about the utility and function of a city, because for most people engaging in the city, it's it's, you know, for work or for digital purposes or service access. But it's also for fun.

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and the part of the embodied and central experience is to for us is is the importance of foregrounding the idea of pleasure and play in the city so that we don't just get all boring and dry.

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So just looking at the kinds of ways that play has been framed in the city.

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So city centres have been long seen as a place of entertainment, but play in the city has been seen as childish, stupefying, or the opium for the masses.

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and this is obviously not the position that we take.

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So for us, playing the city is seen in relation, for example, to the place making project. it's often in the literature it's seen for children's development, like playgrounds. and the development of civil society as well as sustainable well-being. So these are a lot of the ways that play in the city is positioned.

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And also there's the the sort of the looted ludic architecture. So the playful built environment. So for us, thinking about this, we're also looking for how plays a space of resistance.

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And so urban play and playfulness in the city can serve as a subversive practice within the context of adult ad hoc urbanism. So you'll see we'll reconnect back to that thread when we start to talk about navigating in the city.

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I have more to go all right. So one of the things we do is draw from Goffman

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and his work in in game and play

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and thinking about. the the kind of dynamics around place. If we're going to talk about playful environments and sensory environments, what are the sort of characteristics of playfulness, and so he kind of gives us 8 of them, and I guess the one that has been most useful for us in particular is the idea of interaction membranes.

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So this is where we're kind of looking at these sensory spaces and thinking about let me get to that.

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The idea that the rules of play And playful transformation tell players how the real world will be modified inside the encounter. So that's the interaction membrane And for us, thinking about that, we argue that an immersive membrane forms around playful encounters and creates a sense of intimacy, and that that intimacy is generated from the closeness of sharing a world apart.

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So we're always thinking about both the immersive spaces as an overlay. But also this kind of world building experience of intimate encounters that creates a membrane around it. And for us that that overlaps into the ideas that AR mixed reality environments bring, and the kind of effects and impacts of mediated technologies.

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yep. So finally, with that, we characterize the ephemeral social moments of play encounters through intensities and immediacies of experience that involve intention and symbolic focus. And then the collective aspect of that we sort of see it coming through when we draw in the literature on social ethanescence, which is the sort of the upwelling of social interaction as a collective.

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Okay, let's zoom So we. I'll now talk about How we can fold in this concept of digital pleasures which is in work that Alexia and I have done before. so we're arguing that we can actually like, we think of technology as often being quite cold. and not being able to invoke touch, particularly this kind of digital platform based technology.

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But when we look at into

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Internet trends like Asmr which invokes this kind of embodied friction. we can see that engagement with digital spaces can also create embodied pleasures. So it's interesting to think about how that might mix in with digital geolocation. apps like we saw in the early 2,010 things like foursquare.

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which had this kind of gamified pleasure centred, checking in to places of pleasure and leisure in order to gain social status in the city. So we're thinking about how digital pleasures can create these new possibilities for folding in embodied encounters with the city

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in and through digitally immersive spaces that involve the body even more deeply in a sensory environment.

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So we also think about how this works in terms of the navigation of a sensory city. So given the enhanced playful space of the city. We can start to think about how people idiosyncratically navigate, disrupt and respond to sensory environments. So we can use the way, finding concept of desire lines where we think about desire as a productive force in the urban environment, to think about how people might

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playfully navigate mixed reality environments. So in work I've done with a colleague, Peter Walters. Dial desire lines are resistant, complex, and contingent navigational practices

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that are constructed in resistance to, but also with their own logics of efficiency and discovery or solidarity that make helps users take space beyond its intended uses. The uses that capital would like us to do like consumption, for example.

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So this weaving in and out of visibility and public private spaces, is going to continue to characterize playful encounters in the city, and how we think about what immersive sensory environments might be. So I think we're doing okay for time, as Alexia zooms us through the summary of these points

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great. So just some concluding remarks, for us, digital representations of place can be thought as constellations of processes which we argue, of which we argue, play forms an important part.

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The digital city is a space of sensory play that contains extended or mixed reality environments.

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human technology encounters, and the visceral visceral embodiment of digital pleasures.

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As Naomi has kind of said, we're we're thinking about the use of desire lines as a a tool that people will use or create to navigate these kinds of spaces. So digital desire lines indicate how sensory environments will bend and change in response to human agencies and act as the formative pathways through which solidarity, solidarities and politics occurs.

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And finally, we feel like there's more research needed so surprise. And for us, I guess one of the things that we'd like to do is to actually take the concepts in this paper and apply them into interventions in cities and create some comparative case studies around it. So yes, we're definitely swimming high in the conceptual area. But we're pretty keen to materialize this and experiment with it.

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If you want to download the paper you can quickly scan the QR. Code.

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This one.

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Thank you. Everyone joining in the room and on on the zoom as well. just quickly wanted to extend Mark's early acknowledgment to the traditional owners of the cooler nation, both on the where we are today and also in land where I live in work just about half an hour, also south, east of where we are at the moment, and extend my respects to elders, past and present, and to any first nations, people that are joining us today or at the conference more widely.

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I'm presenting some work today at the kind of intersection of of self-tracking and a particular cyber attacking media event

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that occurred in 2,020.

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So the background here is that a garment, a company that makes a variety of technology, technologies and and devices at the consumer level most known for, like wearable technologies, I would say, and GPS things for things like bicycles.

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very much a self-tracking technology for people who are engaging in different sort of fitness, kind of projects or things like that, but they also make a bunch of other technologies for navigation in

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naval

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maritime and aviation areas as well.

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So back in July of 2020. They were the victim of a ransomware attack, largely on their kind of head office area.

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and that took off took offline their major service for people who engage in the those practices of self tracking with wearable devices which is called Darwin connect. It's kind of the main platform that downloads uploads data and allows you to, you know, look at all your statistics over time, and also to share to other services that you might want to connect with be at things like social media, or something like Strava.

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which is particularly particularly popular with the types of people who use garments, devices

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and where we hit the interaction with social media. Is that garment? I guess, like any company. They have a presence on social media, but they actually are pretty quiet. They don't do a lot of posting to social media. And so it's very clear to see when this event happens and explodes as a real uptick in interest, and that's kind of been the focus of this little case. Study of mine.

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government had very little to say, despite this being a a controversy, and there were, you know, I'm sure we all heard a lot about different types of cyber attacks, particularly during the pandemic.

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but they were very quiet about. And so there was a lot a lot of back and forth between different users and not a lot of contributions from gamma themselves on social media. So there

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communications were really really limited during that time, which is probably not a great Pr move for them, but they did quietly, also allegedly, reportedly, pay off this ransom, which is, I don't know what it's like in different context. But in Australia we've had a number of high profile data breaches with very sensitive data over the last couple of years, and the the corporate and government line has to has been to not engage at all with

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with paying ransomware. so interesting to see in this case that it was. It was paid off to the sum of 10 million dollars for them to regain access to

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a variety of services on the company side. Allegedly, user data was not involved in this particular attack.

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But I guess we'll probably not know the truth of that.

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Yeah. So for me, the so what of this is that I've done a lot of past largely ethnographic work with people who engage in different forms of self-tracking in their daily life. And increasingly, it's difficult to see that as A lump sum

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description of practice, of of self-tracking, because it tends to be quite esoteric, and people pursue their own specific sort of interests and niches within that, and also the devices and and their features and affordance has changed so rapidly over time. It's kind of hard to conceptualize it as one big shared

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seeing it.

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And so this opportunity to look at a bunch of people having the same experience of their devices. Going offline at the same time. For this 4 day period of the the the ransomer attack was was super interesting.

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and for me it kind of dovetailed nicely with some kind of fourth wave Hci methodologies that I've been reading about where removal is. The method by which you research, you take

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devices away from people and ask them to kind of diarize their experience. And so here we have a little bit of that I think, happening as well, but without some of the

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methodological implications of of an experiment kind of focus, I suppose.

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So. The study, I suppose.

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Yeah. Call it a kind of pilot study for reasons I'll maybe talk about later if I have time. is is really about Twitter data. But I do want to quickly talk about Facebook data here, just because what's available on crowd tangle talks a little bit more about interactions. And you don't have the the character limits that you do with tweets. So you can see here very clearly, hopefully, clearly, ABC, there's just 3 tweets where Garmin tweets slash Facebook posts where the company addresses the cyber attack, and you can see kind of across a month.

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They're lucky to get, you know, 50 engagements across their their Facebook presences.

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But with these 3 posts it obviously jumps skyrockets. hard to assess what people are really wanting to contribute when they are liking a post or engaging it in any particular way.

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but there are slight changes in terms of things like laughing or angry, or hard reactions across these 3

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to quickly kind of summarize the 3. The first one was just simply, we are experiencing an outage. We we're sorry, you know. We'll try and fix it. The second one is just a ongoing apology for the continued inconvenience at a link to a if a queue that outline that does outline to the to the users that it was a a cyber attack, but doesn't go into any more detail than that, and that's what we hear about it, and that if I queue gets taken offline after the ransom was allegedly paid.

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and then we get a return to operation message at the very end of that as well.

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but obviously on twitter you know, it's a much more uneven

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sort of unfolding because of the time that people might want to wake up and go for a run. You know, someone might be doing that at 5 pm. so very much a global example. of a shared experience that exists outside of the kind of Silicon Valley imaginary that these technology companies kind of tend to work in. And I I believe the first tweet that I have in my data set was in Japan.

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The other and interesting thing about this data is it kind of defies language parameters that you might put on it because people can use. A man did use these 3 hashtags.

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which are English language hashtags, but

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obviously the messages they might be sending are in many different languages.

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So I was collecting those 3 hashtags which pretty much tell the story as it rolls out in order to. It's just from gamma down to like, you know, a gum and down is like gums down. What's happening going out? You just when it's been acknowledged. And people know that there's a shared collective problem and then garment hacked is when the news comes that it's been this cyber attack, and people start to worry a little bit more.

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So there's a bunch of kind of like

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clusters kind of within the main group here.

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and just to speak to a few of them, some of them might just kind of mean anonymizing here. So we have the main garment account. We have some regional accounts and a kind of domain specific garment accounts as well, and then we have a bunch of pretty quickly moving to like people who have gone viral within the kind of Twitter sphere. During this time

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a lot of in- jokes for people that are in fitness and running communities, some commentary from cyber security news outlets and things as well.

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and then also wanted to do a little bit of manual analysis on the slide that it said before, the reciprocity is pretty low, because Darwin doesn't have anything to say, and never replies to anyone on Twitter. But most people who are using a combination, or one of those 3 hashtags do tag garment in their posts, which is why I have gone at the very center of that kind of network.

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But, as you can kind of see, there's these little clusters going on around the outside that I was kind of interested in, because they are a little bit more reciprocal or radial in some cases, and I thought those might be quite interesting. And that's actually where I saw a lot of this language work. So there's a bunch of technology sites that seem to engage in a lot of translation work without wanting to tag garment itself, but wanting to engage with this kind of conversation and kind of share the story of what was happening

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as this phenomenon of the outage and the hack kind of unfolded over time over the 4 days.

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so I think it's quite interesting. A bunch of other kind of spam obviously involved in that, as tends to happen with these things when topics are trending on social media.

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I might skip over this, but as you kind of expect

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capitalism companies involved. People love to tag oppositions. So you find Apple and Fitbit and all these other companies getting tagged as alternatives that you should all be using for your fitness, tracking instead of garland, because galmen are the ones getting hacked and not telling you about it. So some bad Pr. There, I suppose, for them.

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This, as I mentioned a lot of kind of in jokes.

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there's one particular one that I'm not sharing here.

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It's kind of interesting because it because it's a kind of like fo inspirational poster from the current world record holder of the of the Marathon elude kipcho

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and I think it's kind of like deliberately using broken English. But I suspect has also been offered by people who are in a very White Uk based running community. so pretty uneasy about the kind of racial politics on that one. But that was one of the more viral examples of kind of humor, supposed tumour during this period.

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But a majority of the discussion was this kind of if the tree falls in the forest type of debate where it's like, did my run really count this morning because I wasn't able to upload the results to to my garment or to Strava.

324
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And so I think it's this idea of lost activities which is really interesting. And obviously it highlights the kind of things we know about

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the the esoteric and individual practices. I mentioned that come with self-tracking practices.

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01:01:39.470 --> 01:01:53.890
but I think it's particularly interesting, because it also serves to sort of continue what garment was already doing and just kind of not talking about it, and kind of divorces us from the wider infrastructures that are involved in this type of self-tracking.

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And then, because it's online, and everyone likes to sort of have a commentary with one angle or another.

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I think that was fueled by both people who were in the community and outside of the community. Because if you're in the community, it's a joke that you might take a day off, or you might.

329
01:02:11.960 --> 01:02:23.989
you know. Say, does my run really count? But then the people who are outside the community are saying, No, you actually should stop doing this, and you should go, and, you know, touch grass or you know, whatever the whatever the expression might be.

330
01:02:24.030 --> 01:02:28.869
So I think that continues to obscure the connection, to infrastructure.

331
01:02:29.480 --> 01:02:57.169
quick example of something more viral, like examples here. So you have the sort of image. Macro in the middle was very popular, as was doing your own version of what your visualization might look like on the right hand side. And also the most typical thing is probably just these people who are taking screenshots of the outage on their own device, and then sharing a kind of manual photo of their device on in hand as a way to continue the work of sharing what they've been doing.

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And so I'm sort of kind of trying to conceptualize this as kind of a data sense through the loss of the data sense so trying to kind of label it at the same time as saying that it became absent.

333
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and I guess this isn't particularly new for work in this area. A bunch of people who I have I mentioned on the slide here are already working in this space of lively data and affective atmospheres, and so on, that really probe the kind of filter lived and embodied aspects of

334
01:03:23.250 --> 01:03:28.690
doing things like walking or running, or any other type of activity with data generating data

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at the same time.

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And I think because of the pandemic you end up with maybe a bit of an emphasis of that like for for real enthusiasts, communities, you know, there were consecutive years where every Marathon had to be done virtually, and things like that, and I think that really heightened people's valuing of of this type of way of going about their activity.

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As I mentioned before, the the joke kind of aspect, I think, tends to obfuscate the kind of connections that that sense is now having with wider infrastructures.

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so people? very infrequently the exception is is the kind of it experts that were involved in some of the Twitter conversations in those little outer network areas.

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Those are kind of the exception to the rule. Not many people are interested in those connections. You know, this is the same technology that is keeping aeroplanes in the sky or lights on the water. I mean, the boat will probably be on the water if they're not in trouble, going where they should be, at least on the water. And I think that was a real

340
01:04:26.330 --> 01:04:30.680
really interesting point there, that that connection kind of

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01:04:30.690 --> 01:04:39.079
was being kind of glossed over. But this particular hack, I think, really should have been highlighting that that point of connection. For

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01:04:39.140 --> 01:04:43.119
for this particular group of people using garment devices.

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so there's just a quick kind of what's missing here at the end. So I do have more data than this. I'll be honest. My computer crashes when I try to do pretty graphs of it. Which is why I'm kind of using these more basic netalytic visualizations and don't have something kind of more sophisticated where I can tease tease it in.

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excuse it out a bit more on zoom in and out. Maybe as we go we'll do something interactive. So still working through that

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and and working out ways to maybe are.

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add, in some kind of larger communities that are involved in these discussions, and drive a lot of chat, but were perhaps not quite so involved.

347
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and also cases where regional accounts that were usually seem to be mandated to just kind of retweet the main garment message.

348
01:05:26.300 --> 01:05:36.149
There are a few examples where, for example, government India would make tweets that were kind of offscript sort of against the grain of that company silence which I thought were particularly interesting.

349
01:05:36.370 --> 01:05:48.860
And obviously, then there's plenty of deeper analysis that could and should be done. That's kind of beyond my capacity with that translational aspect that I mentioned before, with non-english content, and I think is super interesting. And again.

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01:05:49.010 --> 01:05:53.710
a point of difference. For for very silicon driver, silicon, valley-driven

351
01:05:53.730 --> 01:05:55.279
technology kind of area.

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I think I've set my conclusions ready. I know I'm over time. Thank you. Everyone for listening. I don't want to end on references, so you can scan up the references if you want to see them.

353
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Okay.

354
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yes.

355
01:06:29.190 --> 01:06:31.630
Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah.

356
01:06:32.070 --> 01:06:36.989
Okay. So I think some preachers can come and send that to the

357
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yeah.

358
01:06:54.430 --> 01:06:57.620
Okay, let's speak

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really? Well.

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yeah.

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And this one can be used for questions as well.

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And all this stuff.

363
01:07:27.340 --> 01:07:29.460
Okay, we're up to questions.

364
01:07:31.460 --> 01:07:36.349
So our panelists are ready. Let's collect some questions, and you should use the microphone so

365
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maybe. Will you do some running? Oh, will I do something that would be great?

366
01:07:42.790 --> 01:07:47.090
I'm looking for hands up for questions, and I don't see any.

367
01:07:47.410 --> 01:07:48.729
I see one.

368
01:07:50.530 --> 01:07:52.540
Let's start with one.

369
01:07:52.950 --> 01:07:58.780
Thanks to the order presenters for showing a fascinating work. My question is from Mark.

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01:07:58.830 --> 01:08:09.000
You've brought us through the biological. And then the technological explanations of touch and how it operates. But I'm curious about Huggy Bot.

371
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Yeah, no, because you you've stopped us at Version 2. And you mentioned that there's version 3. I wonder about 2 things, the first of which is that we have seen glimpses of the biological and the technological, how they approach touch. What about social reception?

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01:08:26.680 --> 01:08:49.300
Yeah. And this purchase to how people have responded to Huggy Bot! And I'm curious if you could tell us more. If you have the information, how did the creators at Max Plan go from one to to 3. What were they looking out for? To improve or make better after People have been used to test because, the the last image you showed us about how you bought

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01:08:49.300 --> 01:09:03.150
2 was that there was dress in a dress, and also with gloves, as if to soften the coldness of metal and robots, and also to create a more humane look

374
01:09:03.550 --> 01:09:07.270
beyond machine. Yeah, so glad to hear your thoughts.

375
01:09:10.520 --> 01:09:17.230
Yeah. And good question, because if I'd known the wee time I would have actually showed you the film

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01:09:17.680 --> 01:09:22.200
properly, which would have kind of explained a little bit about this.

377
01:09:22.210 --> 01:09:32.650
But And also I would have dwelt a little bit longer on the hello shaped robot as well. So there's something going on called soft robotics

378
01:09:32.880 --> 01:09:36.039
and software politics obviously, is

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01:09:36.130 --> 01:09:42.209
trying to be a little bit more tactile to employ textures in order to encourage

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01:09:42.560 --> 01:09:52.179
proximity and interaction, and so on, friendless. There's all kinds of animal shapes and shapes which are kind of animal like so kind of zooomorphic.

381
01:09:52.250 --> 01:10:00.560
So if we think of so apart from the world of industrial robots, which are, you know, there's a whole. And there, obviously, the majority of robots

382
01:10:00.770 --> 01:10:02.060
on the planet.

383
01:10:02.170 --> 01:10:22.969
But if you move away from industrial robots and then think about soft robots. So the pillow-shaped thing actually is a company in Edinburgh to start up, which I started to work with, and they have It's very kind of low-fi, so they have 3D. Printed skeleton. a bunch of raspberry pi's. It's quite quaint.

384
01:10:22.990 --> 01:10:36.149
and yeah, and it kind of articulates this movement, but they have. But the the USP is. They have custom-made knitted skins, so it's kind of enveloped in this kind of

385
01:10:36.160 --> 01:10:37.330
texture.

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01:10:38.000 --> 01:10:50.580
and they can be custom-made, and when you buy one, you can specify the design, and so on. So it's quite. It's quite cute as an idea. And the and the future of this is that they have developed

387
01:10:50.880 --> 01:10:55.189
touch senses to be distributed around. So 18 of these

388
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on the knitted skin.

389
01:10:57.300 --> 01:11:05.569
and what they will do is they will respond to touch, and then they will generate the kind of long idea of the CEO of this

390
01:11:05.610 --> 01:11:27.319
companies that it will become a kind of portal. he calls it a kind of digital twin, i, e. It will. okay, surveillance alert here. But it will collect data about the user. And but then, you know, for dementia patients, for example, to display on external

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01:11:27.730 --> 01:11:44.030
screens photographs, you know, to simulate memory, and so on. that are individual to the user and so on, so that you've got a nice, warm, fuzzy, tactile robot which is in the world of soft robotics.

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01:11:44.100 --> 01:11:57.310
which it's kind of interesting. It's interesting. It's they're just starting out. They've got some seed funding. And yeah, I'm going to look at some interactions with them in care homes actually in the next

393
01:11:57.390 --> 01:11:59.000
few months.

394
01:11:59.740 --> 01:12:03.339
But a huggy bot is completely different. And huggy Bot is

395
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yeah at Max Planck. It's a standard robot platform. So the number of

396
01:12:10.520 --> 01:12:19.370
android robotic platforms that are available is relatively limited. So they're just, you know, off the shelf Pretoporte Android robot.

397
01:12:19.590 --> 01:12:27.149
But they've added these arms and the arms have been used and attached to other robot platforms.

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for example, to fold towels.

399
01:12:31.490 --> 01:12:42.359
So there's a tell-folding robot, and so on. So you can see where they're going with this that they're actually repurposing the arms and the arm unit in order to have this coordinated flow of hugging.

400
01:12:42.870 --> 01:12:44.040
And

401
01:12:44.110 --> 01:12:57.399
 yeah. So Huggy Bot, one was quite basic, obviously, and huggy bot 2 is not just the soft materials, but it's also actually.

402
01:12:57.970 --> 01:13:22.550
I step up in terms of the algorithmic complexity, i. E. It kind of works out, you know, with the user. And then the inter hug gestures, and then huggy, what? 3? Again, more complexity to the AI. So the robotic embodiment by itself that that kind of physicality is only ever in combination with this software, which will then have a better picture of the user.

403
01:13:22.620 --> 01:13:26.670
and so on. And if I was able to show you the video, it would have

404
01:13:27.350 --> 01:13:35.469
so different users have different sequences of actions. So if, for example, you're the type of hugger.

405
01:13:36.100 --> 01:13:38.460
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah.

406
01:13:39.860 --> 01:13:51.079
I didn't think I'd be saying that if you're the type of hugger that likes to pat somebody's back at the end to signify the end of, because it's a sequence, right? It's a social

407
01:13:51.100 --> 01:13:59.629
protocol that you need to get away and hug you about 1 0 didn't have any cues for getting away, it would just, you know.

408
01:14:00.810 --> 01:14:11.529
The danger is, you can't ever get away, and these are very powerful arms. I mean, you can get crushed. I mean, seriously.

409
01:14:11.840 --> 01:14:32.279
proximate. protocol, this kind of interaction. So it's very uninviting to do this. But 3 0, actually, yeah, it's it's more than just the texture and the material. It's more than just trying to disguise it as a soft robot. It's actually something which is developing a more complex.

410
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haptic, proximic protocol

411
01:14:35.170 --> 01:14:45.450
and based on each individual user. I mean, it's not like you can just have it in Coney Island, and everyone can approach it. It. It's obviously just a limited number of people.

412
01:14:45.460 --> 01:14:55.900
a user base. And yeah, and if you're the kind of person that doesn't really like hugging. Then you're not going to get much advert, I think, even if your husband does like having an up here

413
01:14:57.040 --> 01:15:03.560
and the yeah, the but the video as well. It started off with it, asking

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in a kind of stimulated folk code of voice.

415
01:15:08.460 --> 01:15:27.609
please hug me, which is really uninviting. I mean, my goodness, my goodness! So I think that answers the question a bit. So I I know there's obviously a long way to go. There's no touch senses on the arms. But you can see where they're going to go with this. And so the the

416
01:15:28.250 --> 01:15:39.359
the engineer who's leading this Alexis Block has got obviously ideas for Huggy bot 4 and and more, and so on. But I think she is pretty much alone.

417
01:15:39.450 --> 01:15:42.850
like there aren't that many teams working on this type of thing.

418
01:15:43.790 --> 01:15:46.770
Yeah. So it doesn't matter if it's chunky.

419
01:15:52.740 --> 01:16:15.790
I have a follow up question about how you bot. So anyone who's ever hugged another person knows that a hug is not just pressure, right? It's also the sense of heat that you get from being in contact with someone their smell. Sometimes you can kind of feel like their body being alive in that kind of sense that you're hugging like. Someone with a heartbeat and a pulse

420
01:16:16.350 --> 01:16:19.049
which is not huggy. Bot. So

421
01:16:19.540 --> 01:16:26.739
is this just another version of pressure therapy? Is it right to actually call this a hug?

422
01:16:28.510 --> 01:16:39.020
Yeah, no, actually, that's interesting. I hadn't really thought of that. I mean, is it basically a squeeze box? Is it like the Temple Grandin squeeze box? Yeah.

423
01:16:39.080 --> 01:16:43.210
Yeah. Which also has a social utility in itself.

424
01:16:43.720 --> 01:16:54.599
Yeah, I mean, I'm not quite sure. I mean. So Alexis Bloc and Kevin Cooper and the team there. They actually submitted a paper for the special issue of of this journal on

425
01:16:54.890 --> 01:16:59.420
critical approaches to affect and embodiment.

426
01:16:59.470 --> 01:17:06.570
which is this transaction, and human robot interaction especially, that came out just this year.

427
01:17:06.670 --> 01:17:13.989
and you know in it there were just a whole load of graphs, and so on. But there's nothing to do with the

428
01:17:14.170 --> 01:17:27.999
motivation behind the project. In the first place, like what is it they were really trying to do? What is it that they are trying to kind of fulfill the need. For so it does seem as though it is an engineer's solution to a problem that probably could be solved

429
01:17:28.320 --> 01:17:32.459
some other way, like actually having more humans

430
01:17:32.540 --> 01:17:43.840
around well paid. I mean, I think this is generally the argument when it comes to any kind of robot, humans can do it better if you actually pay people better for the care tasks

431
01:17:43.900 --> 01:17:56.519
that we need as a society, especially when it comes to aging and demographics, and so on. I mean, Japan obviously has its own kind of political economy arguments to with immigration, and so on.

432
01:17:56.630 --> 01:18:02.870
But I don't think other countries really quite have the same, you know, we shouldn't have the same logic.

433
01:18:02.960 --> 01:18:30.429
so, in other words, you know, it's a it's probably an engineered solution to a problem that shouldn't really be there in the first place. But I think it's kind of interesting that that you know when we think about touch and robot touch, that the human computer interface, like the devices they just deal with a certain type of touch. So there's a certain kind of profile, and they're one of the few teams that's trying to do something a little bit different in that kind of social touch aspects the slow touch.

434
01:18:30.510 --> 01:18:32.269
I can't think of anything else.

435
01:18:32.310 --> 01:18:36.650
you know, in terms of the robotics area that does this or is going that direction really.

436
01:18:37.890 --> 01:18:38.550
So

437
01:18:39.060 --> 01:18:40.520
like this.

438
01:18:40.580 --> 01:18:50.990
I'm sorry I didn't go for anything. Thanks very much. I'm sorry I had the others get a chance. After this

439
01:18:51.060 --> 01:18:54.070
I was fascinated by your comments on empathy.

440
01:18:54.230 --> 01:19:01.740
especially right at the beginning. When you mention. We know that they're trying to create machines that promote it.

441
01:19:02.220 --> 01:19:20.370
And just a quick, quick story. We have a new Hospital Royal Adelaide Hospital. So we have robots. H bots! Who are meant to run round so food! And I heard one day that The raft, which is programmed, of course, is to go to particular people.

442
01:19:22.080 --> 01:19:27.530
and somebody had snuck into the stairwell to smoke

443
01:19:27.720 --> 01:19:29.400
and lift the door open.

444
01:19:29.540 --> 01:19:42.750
and the poor old robot got confused and fell down this stairwell, and what astonished me! There's no way I want to hug something that looks like a tramer, Bill, you know it's cruising round with meals on it.

445
01:19:43.090 --> 01:19:45.550
but I felt terrible compassion.

446
01:19:45.680 --> 01:19:53.820
So this was only doing what it was meant to do, you know, carrying out what it was programmed to do, and yet I felt

447
01:19:53.880 --> 01:19:57.810
we are sorry about this, and I thought, this is not fair.

448
01:19:58.000 --> 01:20:02.479
I just wondered what your you know. It doesn't need to be

449
01:20:03.470 --> 01:20:09.819
it. It crashed. I had to repair it that it was a

450
01:20:10.370 --> 01:20:11.300
like this.

451
01:20:13.400 --> 01:20:33.639
Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Jean. Yeah, I'll no, that's right. I I will try to be a brief as possible. but there's one chapter actually in the with Alet and Patricia Vargas book living with robots, which is exactly like a similar story of a light-sensitive, so light-seeking robot, the one that really really is

452
01:20:33.640 --> 01:20:50.449
basic ones. Which kind of again, it kind of ends up out of bounds, because it's just trying to go for the sun, the the source of light. And so it just goes for miles and miles and ends up in a ditch and getting run over by car or whatever, and so kind of similar thing. And then also, we know the

453
01:20:51.360 --> 01:20:57.700
yeah, the hitchhiker what the hitch bot as well. Do you know about this? Which was built by a team

454
01:20:57.900 --> 01:21:02.719
in the States? And it traveled all over the United States

455
01:21:02.730 --> 01:21:19.529
And then it ended up. Which state was it where it ended up being pulverized? It's heading yes, beaten up, and it's head removed, and being left in a ditch. So yeah, yeah, and

456
01:21:19.560 --> 01:21:23.480
it was America. So of course

457
01:21:24.440 --> 01:21:30.769
I've hitchhiked in America. I tried to the Jack Herwick thing when I was a very young man.

458
01:21:31.130 --> 01:21:41.839
the same thing could have happened to me. I mean, yeah, that's right. But I think the serious point behind this is that it's trading is piggybacking on this idea of this?

459
01:21:42.070 --> 01:21:48.609
 yeah. yes.

460
01:21:48.690 --> 01:22:03.550
yeah. And that you're projecting. So this is actually one of the themes within human robot interaction is the the anthropomorphism element that it trades on this so much. And yeah.

461
01:22:03.660 --> 01:22:05.990
yeah, yeah, that's right.

462
01:22:07.380 --> 01:22:10.340
Okay, more questions. I'm looking for hands.

463
01:22:16.790 --> 01:22:18.270
Sorry about that.

464
01:22:19.150 --> 01:22:19.910
That.

465
01:22:20.630 --> 01:22:30.009
Sorry about that. Hi. I have a question for Andrea Brigitte. This is Sabine Andron. Hello! I'm waving at you. You can't see.

466
01:22:30.650 --> 01:22:38.289
I really found your talk very inspiring, and I want to draw on one particular aspect of it, which I think also quite

467
01:22:38.300 --> 01:22:59.940
ties in quite nicely with the conversation we were just having, which is right at the end. You mentioned the the right to the problem, maybe as a form of right to the city the right to define what the problem is, because it seems to me, and maybe you can comment on this a bit as well. I'm sure you've looked at the

468
01:23:00.350 --> 01:23:13.900
space syntax methods and literature. and how they're trying to solve this in a very, you know, obtain the most optimal trajectory within the built environment. So

469
01:23:14.060 --> 01:23:26.920
then maybe the problem becomes a form of resistance and staying with the problem, not staying with the trouble. So maybe you can comment a bit more on this, the right to the problem.

470
01:23:28.080 --> 01:23:49.880
andrea mubi brighenti: thank you. Thank you very much. it's it's a very interesting experience in terms of the session on on data sensors to be blind. Actually, I'm so it's yeah. But I can't see, really. But you know, it's I recognize your voice. So it's still familiar. And it's a different sensor room that we're having here.

471
01:23:49.980 --> 01:24:06.410
andrea mubi brighenti: yeah, so it's a it's it's it. I recognize myself very much what you what you say and what you suggest, I mean, it's what we're with under. We're trying to to to think is, how is it that in this, in, in this

472
01:24:06.410 --> 01:24:31.320
andrea mubi brighenti: notification, let's say, an environment. And in this solution oriented, this solution is ideology. we can dwell somehow in in this, in the, in the problem. And slow down. Yeah. On Monday we have a session on Georgia Perk in the same conference, and one of Brex recommendation was precise to this idea

473
01:24:31.320 --> 01:24:36.889
of in for ordinary or slowing down and becoming kind of

474
01:24:36.890 --> 01:25:01.820
andrea mubi brighenti: dump so that you don't you? You're not too smart, and you're not too fast, and the the the slowing down opens up the whole new real of of of existence, and how a whole new room of subjectivity. there, there is this, this in this encounter between the senses and the data and the body technology space connection. Let's say there is this long

475
01:25:01.820 --> 01:25:16.859
andrea mubi brighenti: tradition. That's a resistance of a number of authors and and and scholars who have been somehow approaching the city and urban space as a kind of state of mind. And

476
01:25:17.090 --> 01:25:44.519
andrea mubi brighenti: so so that's the the, the the, the urban domain, and and the there is this counter tendency to somehow re-enchant the. They are an urban domain which modernity, as as a struggle to make. streamlined, efficient igenic and civilized. And so all these other parts of the of the experience are coming back

477
01:25:44.520 --> 01:26:08.500
andrea mubi brighenti: also in your own work work Sabina you working on surfaces. And how is it that the the the surfaces are a complex domain of of of tensions where where different stories can be can be told of it. And so at each level just lay here, let's say of of of the urban. You can find the same.

478
01:26:08.500 --> 01:26:27.450
andrea mubi brighenti: let's say the tour through a different sense of realities and through different imaginations and different dream states if you want. So yes, I'm I'm very sympathetic with this idea of staying with the with the problem. Let's say

479
01:26:39.900 --> 01:26:47.029
so. Thank you for your very inspiration presentations. So I have a questions about the playful cities.

480
01:26:47.170 --> 01:27:15.020
So I want to know more about how you defy the production of the things of playfulness in the cities, because we all know that how humor captured the information from the space or from the machine. On the one hand, we have the Virgin, which is like more dominant one nowadays. But, on the other hand, just like the mirror plant's idea, we have the whole body per sections, which is, let's say, the Po

481
01:27:15.020 --> 01:27:39.940
pre-exception, which is a haptic also the idea of gravity, change of directions, or speed, or something. So I want to know what to like directions you prefer or amphasize on. And also you mentioned about the spatial or space interventions you want to Ev to later. So I also want to know more about it if you already have some kind of ideas. Thank you.

482
01:27:42.690 --> 01:27:53.020
thanks. Thanks for your question. I think this is a really interesting one, because we do see attempts to create playful spaces in cities. When I think.

483
01:27:53.130 --> 01:28:02.780
I think of how cities set up like Instagram, friendly spots, The intent is to kind of invoke that playful response.

484
01:28:02.810 --> 01:28:28.519
But I think it's really interesting, because when you watch people engaging with those sites, it's actually not that fun. It doesn't look that fun most of the time. they're sort of. They go, they pose they leave, and it's that kind of like hollowing out of play that can kind of happen with these digital tools. So I think the interesting thing is like, how can we stop them

485
01:28:28.640 --> 01:28:56.200
being used as tools for simply aesthetic reproduction in the digital realm. And think about how we can actually make them interesting, sensory, and like genuinely play playful in a way that alysses like sociality, and potential, like generative, as opposed to purely like representational and Alexia will have some ideas about interventions.

486
01:28:56.890 --> 01:28:57.640
Yeah.

487
01:28:57.680 --> 01:29:21.570
So at this point in time, the intervention concept is pretty light on the on the ground, because we're basically working through these. But these questions, what is play. How can we understand play within sort of mixed reality environments? What is playful about an encounter? How does the encounter become that kind of intimacy.

488
01:29:21.570 --> 01:29:30.549
that kind of intimate exchange of self with the other, which is sort of fundamental to the way that play creates something beyond itself.

489
01:29:30.830 --> 01:29:47.640
Right? So you've got that sort of plays is vulnerable, expressive, subjective. So it's it's not defined by any particular parameters. So for us, looking for the looseness in the weave of a of a kind of environment that people can then

490
01:29:47.660 --> 01:29:49.439
appropriate

491
01:29:49.620 --> 01:30:16.190
that they can then, you know, attend that kind of guerrilla urbanism which is really about the the self navigating through agency in the world and us creating the structures through that kind of agential behavior. So the the types of interventions that I think we're going to be playing with will obviously have. You know, you really basic things. How do you do this in a city? Well, you've got to use technologies that everyone has.

492
01:30:16.190 --> 01:30:31.979
So at this point in time, they've got smartphones would be the overlay interface. that have that have to be like a game engine that generates the kind of immersive experience within a virtual context. So combining those 2 kind of

493
01:30:31.980 --> 01:30:55.809
aspects. And of course, the way that you've got sound also light and sight. So there has to be a material aspect to it that's in the city itself that can be felt and experienced through haptic technologies. So just thinking about lacing in all the different types of sensory technologies we have available to us. So it's not just like about a pair of glasses and a visual.

494
01:30:55.810 --> 01:31:14.450
It's also about the sensory and the way that people can change and shape the environment through the way that their their embodied experience moves through it, whether it's in the city itself, whether it's through that kind of virtual, spatial kind of experience

495
01:31:14.450 --> 01:31:26.839
like, how does all of this intersect? So there's so many questions about the the practicalities of what that looks like in play in the city, through the technologies that we have access to.

496
01:31:26.850 --> 01:31:35.659
and also then the conceptual side to it, which is intimacy, encounter, play sociality. And then

497
01:31:35.970 --> 01:31:41.930
what that actually creates in itself in the city. So that's me. Just

498
01:31:42.230 --> 01:31:47.250
so. in the paper which you don't have to read. But we have something about

499
01:31:47.350 --> 01:32:14.150
Rhythm analysis where he talks about the linear and the circular and the circular is what delights us. It's the changing of the seasons. It's kind of nature, and the linear is like the everyday, the dripping of the tap. He says it's kind of it can also be grading. So I think what we're interested in is staging interventions that move us out of the linear and into the cyclical. In the city where the city has

500
01:32:14.170 --> 01:32:28.590
a new capacity to be exceptional and to delight rather than being sort of trapped in these sort of dripping tap modes of digital interface. I guess you could say

501
01:32:30.630 --> 01:32:42.610
you don't mind. I just like to follow up a question on this? Actually, so can I just ask when you talk about gravity and balance and those kind of

502
01:32:42.700 --> 01:32:49.470
in a bodily senses? Are there interactions that you're aware of

503
01:32:49.480 --> 01:32:52.039
that in cities or in.

504
01:32:52.090 --> 01:33:04.089
you know, urban play spaces that are using these? Are you aware of these yourself? Yeah, because I'm both a researcher on the digital communities. But also I'm an architect.

505
01:33:04.090 --> 01:33:23.690
So I also, I personally do have some projects about this like, put it in very simple, with always like work around on a like flat floor, with like a purple gestures. But sometimes, when you change the degree of the slope, also the chain you, the

506
01:33:23.690 --> 01:33:41.870
feeling of the materials. And then immediately, people can have some like in conventional gestures or movement towards it. So basically, I also develop some installations. If you are interesting, I will introduce more to you later. But it's kind of like this kind of

507
01:33:41.880 --> 01:33:46.460
like a slopes mixed of slopes and steps.

508
01:33:46.460 --> 01:34:15.250
and I embedded some like pressure sensors underneath the floor so which can track people's. blackboard lay interactions with this space. So in this space people not only like working. They're just like laying down or just like jumping, surrounding through, like all kinds of this kind of movement. So I would like also crowd interesting where you'll talk about the preference. Talk about the heptics. So I found it very similar.

509
01:34:15.940 --> 01:34:35.470
Yeah. So if you don't mind, I just want to kind of follow up a question to to both of you guys, actually. And I think also to then a little bit as well, just in terms of, so I only discovered your paper last night as a download, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I will be absolutely but just as as a kind of precaution. So, on the one hand, we have Lefevre

510
01:34:35.600 --> 01:34:54.079
and, on the other hand, if you have to bore, and you know if we're going to talk about it kind of crudely, I guess And to a certain extent it's obviously in in Andrea's paper as well, that, on the one hand, the you know, the thing that's kind of uniting some of these papers together is maybe the idea that

511
01:34:54.300 --> 01:34:57.579
there's an over-coded space

512
01:34:57.990 --> 01:35:12.380
of the city as obviously an extractive resource. It's highly capitalized. The idea of play as well like

513
01:35:13.010 --> 01:35:32.510
 you know, in the 24, 7 essay, you know, talking about this idea of of just an extension of more capital, right? That you know that finding like, it's very interesting language. You're using the membrane and the loosening the space of the weed, and so on.

514
01:35:32.570 --> 01:35:43.650
At the same time these cities have become more and more of an extractive resource for more and more people. They're unaffordable in terms of rents.

515
01:35:43.690 --> 01:35:55.029
We're seeing kind of the rhetoric of play used more and more in terms of engaging the city otherwise, which can only

516
01:35:55.200 --> 01:35:58.719
I mean it not only, but it is also the

517
01:35:58.970 --> 01:36:04.540
co-opted. Obviously, by this idea of development of further development and harbor

518
01:36:04.580 --> 01:36:07.199
filaments, and so on

519
01:36:07.440 --> 01:36:15.030
with with the Garmin data as well. I mean, you know, this is a kind of case in point, really, isn't it, that that obviously

520
01:36:15.760 --> 01:36:16.750
the

521
01:36:16.850 --> 01:36:27.699
spoken and unspoken assumptions behind this is that it's voluntary data offering. And yet also, the data is actually

522
01:36:28.490 --> 01:36:37.469
the complaint about the data not being uploaded is actually also deeply unsettling. Obviously, because it's kind of a felt.

523
01:36:37.620 --> 01:36:51.539
But at the same time it's not your data. It's data that's owned on services owned by on a different continent. It's the same thing with Strava as well, and the Strava art that was happening right? So you know,

524
01:36:51.640 --> 01:36:57.760
giant pinces and spaceships, and so on. made with

525
01:36:57.840 --> 01:37:22.380
geolocation data, as a form of kind of play. But at the same time, you know, who actually owns the data. It's not you. It's it's a a giant corporation on a different content. And so on. So I'm just wondering about you know, the role of capital here about, you know. Who? Whose interest is it that play and sensory play and losing the weave is.

526
01:37:22.830 --> 01:37:24.820
on the one hand, extremely necessary.

527
01:37:24.860 --> 01:37:33.409
But are we going more? Is it going to be more subsumption to the spectacle, or is there really the possibility, deep down, of some

528
01:37:33.830 --> 01:37:38.789
that appropriation has that power to subvert this

529
01:37:38.810 --> 01:37:40.529
in some ways

530
01:37:42.200 --> 01:37:43.080
the

531
01:37:44.680 --> 01:37:55.140
a little bit. Yeah. And I think I agree with Mark there. The real kind of problem that I saw was this like, here's an opportunity where a bunch of

532
01:37:55.240 --> 01:38:13.850
why users of these digital devices are gonna have to grapple with the idea that they're entangled in these larger kind of data infrastructure that are transnational. They have a control of the data, and it didn't really happen. but certainly continues to highlight yet that that it's really getting kind of hardwired in that connection to that.

533
01:38:13.890 --> 01:38:35.430
What I was kind of calling a data sense. But it's it's it's getting its way into all of the things that are already offered by those technologies. It's it's where's my, where's my vibration? Every kilometer. Where's my audio feedback? Telling me my pace. And where's the potentially going to gam a 5 reward aspect of me being able to see that rendered out nicely, and a chart on my wrist, or later on on my device.

534
01:38:35.440 --> 01:38:38.500
That being kind of absent to that period of time.

535
01:38:39.070 --> 01:38:41.379
Yeah, I was. But I don't know. It was making me think.

536
01:38:41.590 --> 01:38:46.470
yeah, I guess your point was, maybe it's like, where can we get to that genuine

537
01:38:46.910 --> 01:38:50.590
something else that isn't like encroached on by capital.

538
01:38:50.809 --> 01:38:59.379
Yeah, I don't know. I wonder whether and I know. This kind of came through the questions already. I wondered whether Delight and this ad hoc idea you were talking about like a

539
01:38:59.510 --> 01:39:07.569
yeah, if there's a particular true form of that that you had in mind when there is so much kind of

540
01:39:07.610 --> 01:39:23.700
capital co-opted ad hoc. It's a design space, you know, mid winter. At the moment we love a festival. We have a pop up, you know, but those things are all kind of like design spaces where it's like this wasn't here before. This isn't even playful, but, as you said, it lacks a kind of genuine

541
01:39:24.020 --> 01:39:25.299
this to it.

542
01:39:25.340 --> 01:39:26.570
Yeah.

543
01:39:27.270 --> 01:39:31.210
I think this is interesting. And I think it's really easy to get

544
01:39:31.490 --> 01:39:50.160
caught into this idea that, like the the capital, is the defining logic, but it is capital that has taken away so much of the sensory city from us. I was in Fitzroy the of the day, waiting for a tram, and there's just like one single seat next to a pole, and it's like not even under

545
01:39:50.309 --> 01:40:19.209
like shade or anything. And this is done for a variety of reasons, as we all we all know. and I was just thinking, oh, like it's it's capital that's impoverished city spaces and data spaces in order to like further embricate us in the offerings that they provide to further engage us in pleasure. And as you were talking about interventions, I was thinking, Where's that data going? And I was thinking, can we not think about

546
01:40:19.540 --> 01:40:43.890
interventions where the data goes? Nowhere, that we have a near past where the data hasn't always been extracted. That is not an inevitable end of having senses. We can create possibilities where the data is looped, it goes nowhere. It sits with itself and just and and interacts with us, as you know, a human data assemblage rather than being extracted

547
01:40:44.261 --> 01:41:12.129
into webs of capital. So I would love to see interventions where data goes nowhere. And think about how that can generate these playful spaces like we used to have markets in the city that weren't curated pop-ups like that. That is not an unimaginable thing. And I think it's more about not sort of seeding that ground ideologically and and thinking about ways we can kind of like claw some of that back.

548
01:41:14.469 --> 01:41:32.690
The unrelated to the paper that I was talking about, but related kind of topically is is people who do. Orienteering I found still have a I shouldn't frame it as it doesn't have to be in the past. People who currently are doing. Yeah, that kind of thing where it's very much a conversation that would describe

549
01:41:32.750 --> 01:41:39.169
doing that in like a team of 2. And then it's a debrief session down at the pub with your

550
01:41:39.420 --> 01:41:45.109
teammate working out like what you did. We can do better next on what the experience was like, and it's all.

551
01:41:45.490 --> 01:41:53.949
And I want more kind of analog than what's here also, just quickly. Did you? Did you? Both Alex and me? Were you choosing to have.

552
01:41:54.070 --> 01:42:02.780
I guess, very non stereotypically city images in your presentation. Okay.

553
01:42:03.720 --> 01:42:10.820
yeah. So I've got something on the the data stuff. But basically, those photos were taken in a lot. Spain.

554
01:42:10.960 --> 01:42:26.729
and I was recently at a research residency in creative cities there, with a bunch of scholars. And our job was to right. So I literally wrote the backbone skeleton that we've worked from today at that at that Residency

555
01:42:26.740 --> 01:42:30.380
and those photos.

556
01:42:30.810 --> 01:42:44.379
we're taken at half-light with a a photographer who was there as a creative practitioner. So we were playing with the senses Moving between night and day

557
01:42:44.380 --> 01:43:01.609
at like we got up at 5. Did that walk where a lot of those photos came from, and we also did it at night time, at the twilight hour, the dusky hour. And so all of those sorts of things were just forming like a back end for me about

558
01:43:01.920 --> 01:43:30.730
what augmentation and sensory experiences are, and how we can kind of imagine them outside of the the glaring of the light. So those photos are literally just a part of that creative practice that has given us the the prompts to draw on different types of literature, to to start thinking about what this actually looks like. And we're starting from the questions to what does it feel like.

559
01:43:30.980 --> 01:43:41.050
 So that's that's a long answer to that one. So those photos are mine, and they they form the kind of creative insp for it.

560
01:43:41.110 --> 01:43:51.750
And just to kind of pull back to the data ownership space. So just very briefly, a part of the paper draws on literature around the Metiverse, which is

561
01:43:51.980 --> 01:44:12.169
currently sort of dying in the Facebook platform side of things, and is still prolific in the web. 3 blockchain game game space and gaming space. So there's a lot of discussion around who owns the data that comes out of these sorts of environments. And how can it be used

562
01:44:12.170 --> 01:44:27.080
and collective ownership. So we also draw on the idea of a digital digital commons kind of underpinning these sorts of environments. So it's definitely a part of our way of critiquing platform capitalism and capital

563
01:44:27.580 --> 01:44:34.049
is to to start drawing on some of these alternative discourses, to say, Well, look, we don't have to imagine it that way.

564
01:44:34.070 --> 01:44:52.770
We we people are not going to play. If they if they feel like they're going into an instructive extractive environment like, yes, of course there. There are different stakeholders. There's different values, different agendas, capital and markets is going to be a part of it, of course, but it's not the default

565
01:44:52.910 --> 01:44:54.170
beginning point

566
01:44:58.130 --> 01:45:00.110
and the

567
01:45:00.650 --> 01:45:01.520
to my.

568
01:45:02.770 --> 01:45:10.090
So in the context of all this talk about crappy robots and the trouble.

569
01:45:10.400 --> 01:45:21.280
the troubles with capital and Anxiety when the device doesn't work, and I'm going to target this question towards Ben. But my question is about resistance

570
01:45:21.590 --> 01:45:22.680
and

571
01:45:22.780 --> 01:45:45.450
a return to the body, I guess, and on in your presentation there were a couple of comments and responding tweets. If I understand correctly of people saying, Yes, you can. You know you can run without the device. Go outside, feel the so. Stop looking at your fucking watch, and I wonder if you want to speak to this point on resistance in related to identification of bodies.

572
01:45:45.990 --> 01:45:50.390
Yeah, I think it's I think it's certainly there.

573
01:45:52.170 --> 01:45:59.010
I guess I guess the trouble. I guess the the tricky part for me is a lot of the loudest voices in

574
01:45:59.720 --> 01:46:05.119
a lot of the loudest voices in resisting are either outsiders or for

575
01:46:06.320 --> 01:46:19.280
or people. Yeah, I think here outside is mainly the issue. So I think people who have gone, or even even this issue of like, is it the default space to enter into an extractive kind of exchange. So people that have kind of gone through this and got sick of it and have decided

576
01:46:19.490 --> 01:46:31.999
there are other ways around it in terms of yeah limiting, sharing, obfuscating things. There's little practices that are allowed to continue in a little bit of both. Yeah, small acts of kind of soft resistance

577
01:46:32.120 --> 01:46:36.839
or yet completely divesting of the technology.

578
01:46:37.550 --> 01:46:46.739
There's an interesting paper that's about episodic use of technology as an act of self-care

579
01:46:46.760 --> 01:46:51.559
mitigate against you have certain tendencies you might have, or histories you might have in your own biography that make

580
01:46:51.880 --> 01:46:52.960
these types of

581
01:46:52.980 --> 01:46:57.230
self-tracking data like kind of problematic at times.

582
01:46:57.430 --> 01:47:04.160
but yeah, I think it's tricky with the outsider kind of perspective, because you do lose

583
01:47:04.490 --> 01:47:18.240
a sense of empathy. to go back to empathy for certain communal kind of experiences that people do want to have, that I think they should be able to able to have in yeah, pleasure and leisure and play and all kind of things we're talking about. So

584
01:47:18.670 --> 01:47:22.590
yeah, tricky.

585
01:47:23.040 --> 01:47:43.229
I don't know that this is something that you would observe in relation to your own area. But I've done some work on tracking in the past. And I've been really interested in cases in my data set about non-use When I've done this research, I've I've said that I'll speak to hang out with, do digital ethnography with users and non users.

586
01:47:43.230 --> 01:47:59.880
And I've got a few people who are non-user non-users, and some people who have stepped back. And they talk about the problems of stepping back, which is really interesting. But it's such a small literature. There's a handful of papers on disconnection that are out there. But yeah, I encourage you to look at it. More

587
01:48:02.570 --> 01:48:17.119
sorry. And one last thing on that. I think the user aspect is tricky for us to in sociology, in social sciences, more widely as it gets us. As much as I love getting into different bodies of literature that kind of like Hci space of as soon as you say non-user. It's presuming it feels like

588
01:48:17.220 --> 01:48:23.180
it's an uneasy prefix, you end up with the presumption that the user is the site of

589
01:48:23.350 --> 01:48:27.650
normalcy that you're working in either direction from.

590
01:48:27.790 --> 01:48:38.609
And yeah, like. And when when I was doing like my Phd research, my initial kind of design work around doing ethnographic work was to try and have yeah groups of non-users and things. And I ended up pulling back from that idea

591
01:48:38.620 --> 01:48:42.970
because I couldn't figure out I didn't have a

592
01:48:43.150 --> 01:48:44.280
yes, so

593
01:48:46.840 --> 01:48:50.320
thank you right on time. Can you please. Thank our panelists