This article addresses Listening with Elephant Ears, a contemporary music composition and performance created by the author together with the Elefantöra (Elephant Ear) ensemble. Elefantöra is a norm-critical music ensemble that includes both disabled and non-disabled musicians. When musicians are defined as disabled, normative assumptions regarding the correct use of musical instruments and expert definitions of good sound generate rehabilitative approaches to music that perpetuate exclusions of ableism. This article examines the intersections that exist between exclusions of ableism and exclusions based on musical virtuosity. It focuses on the ways in which Elefantöra contests both exclusions of ableism and virtuosity in their creative reappropriations of sound technology. Composed in the fall of 2020 as a collaborative artistic research engagement, Listening with Elephant Ears was first performed at the Lund Contemporary Music Festival in Sweden, October 2021. The article draws on ethnographic and sound material generated from my artistic research engagement with Elefantöra. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, Listening with Elephant Ears actively reappropriates the Zoom video conference software as a music technology. The piece embraces Zoom’s limitations and emphasizes the aesthetic value of the audio distortions and digital interference that Zoom introduces into musical performance. Critiquing regimes of regulation that situate disabled musicians differently to non-disabled musicians, Listening with Elephant Ears applies care as a theoretical perspective from which to reflect critically on rehabilitative approaches to music and the associated exclusions of ableism and musical virtuosity.

With this paper, we suggest a new ethical and conceptual framework for how to enter into companionships with digital technologies and digital creations in an increasingly media dominated society. We argue that such a framework is needed, as recent developments within digital technologies have sparked cultural anxieties concerning the agency and liveliness of such technologies to the extent of creating popular imaginaries of “technologies-as-monsters” (Suchman 2018). Examples of such imaginaries of monstrous technologies can be found within contemporary popular culture, but the ties between the monster and technological developments have a much longer history and have been explored within literature and art for centuries, the most notable example being Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus (1818/2003). Using discourse and textual analysis, as well as Monster Studies and Feminist Posthumanism, we investigate the legacy of the cultural and scientific imaginary of technologies-as-monsters, and the role played by media in transporting these imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015). We offer an analysis of contemporary science fiction narratives across media – such as TV, film and novels – and discuss how they influence imaginaries of the technologies of the future. We also propose new methods based on creative writing for rethinking and retelling stories of future co-existence and companionship with techno-monsters. 

References

Jasanoff, Sheila (2015) “Future imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity”, pp. 1-34 in Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (eds.) Dreamscapes of Modernity. Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shelley, Mary (1818/2003) Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin.

Suchman, Lucy (2018) “Frankenstein’s Problem”, pp. 13-18 in Ulrike Schultze, Margunn Aanestad, Magnus Mähring, Carsten Østerlund and Kai Riemer (eds.) Living with Monsters? Social Implications of Algorithmic Phenomena, Hybrid Agency, and the Performativity of Technology. Cham: Springer.

When new data practices are being deployed at cultural heritage organisations, a new set of apprehensions and insecurities emerge. We invite participants to the interactive session where we employ monsters to explore what is happening with data practices in cultural heritage organisations. The participants will confront/get to know their data monsters through interactive exercises: depicting the monster, naming the monster and addressing the monster.

As contemporary research conceptualizes the agency of technology and data through the figure of the monster, our workshop aims to explore the monstrous aspects of data practices so that we might learn to live (differently) with our monsters. In the three-part exercises, the participants will explore the mutuality of agency in relation to data practices as monsters.

The workshop is intended for people who are working with data in the cultural heritage organisations – through collections’, management’, visitors’ or other kinds of data. In this workshop, we will experiment with monster making as a collaborative inquiry into data practices. Data and activities around it are often very elusive, and we hope that after the workshop, participants will be better aware of their own ideas about data practices or will be equipped to conduct a similar workshop at their home institution with concerned and wary colleagues to discuss data monsters and their care.

In this article, we suggest approaching writing as a vulnerable practice marked by an unstable boundary between bodies: bodies of text and bodies of writers. We present an exercise-method that we refer to as Monster Writing, which we have developed in order to engage with these instabilities as well as in order to address experiences of difficulty, anxiety and uncertainty in relation with the text and writing process. Though the writing process can at times be exciting and thrilling, and at other times perhaps a little tedious and mundane, for some it also presents (more than) occasional encounters with one's own insecurities, shame and doubt. We argue that this potentially more painful relationship between writer and text should be awarded more attention in scholarship on writing, and that a way of doing so is through the framework of feminist theory on vulnerability, embodiment, and the monstrous. 

The central interest of this paper is the anthropomorphic social robot Ai-Da (Aidan Meller Gallery/Oxford University), perceived as an actor in the interplay of cultural and representational gestures. These gestures determine how this robot is presented—that is, how its activities are articulated, interpreted and promoted. This paper criticises the use of a transhistorical discourse in the presentational strategies around this robot, since this discourse reinforces the so-called “myth of a machine”. The discussion focuses on the individuation and embodiment of this drawing robot. It is argued that the choice to provide Ai-Da with an evocative silicone face, coupled with an anthropomorphic body, is a socio-political decision that shapes public imaginaries about social robots in general.

This paper considers the ways in which silences and absences are a central part of research that relieson automated data collection from social media or the internet. In recent years, automated data collection driven or supported research methods have gained popularity within the social sciencesand humanities. With thisincrease in popularity, it becomes ever more pertinent to consider how toengage with digital data, and how both engagementand data are situated, messy,and contingent. Based on experiences with “missing”data, thispaper mobilizes the framework of hauntology to make sense of what relationships may be builtwith missing dataand how silences haunt research practices. Ultimately, we argue that it is possible to reimagine absent data not as a limitation but as an invitation to reflect on and establish new methods for working with automated data collections.

The Artificial Creativity virtual conference aimed to stir a discussion about the cultural, societal and ethical aspects of artworks featuring artificial intelligence or robots engaged in creative production. The conference dates were 19–20 November 2020 and it was hosted by the research lab Medea, the School of Arts and Communication, and the Data Society research programme – all at Malmö University, Sweden. The conference received generous support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

Videos of keynotes and some participant presentations are available through Malmö University's video repository, MaU Play: https://play.mau.se/playlist/details/0_dvsr6i1f

Keynote speakers:

• Dr. habil. Andreas Broeckmann (Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany). "Robots versus Machines".
• Professor Mark Amerika (University of Colorado, US). "Fatal Error: Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI)".
• Professor Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths University, UK). "Beyond Machine Vision: How to Build a Non-Trivial Perception Machine".

Participants:

• Arandas, Luís, Mick Grierson, and Miguel Carvalhais. "Continuous Contributions of Artificial Agents in Performance Regarding Static Artefacts".
• Ashton, Daniel. "Assembling Creative Work Futures: Automation and Portfolio Working in the Creative Economy".
• Axhamn, Johan. "EU Copyright Law and AI".
• Balfour, Lindsay. "Beauty is in the Eye of the Algorithm: Artificially Intelligent Creativity and its Ethical Implications".
• Carvalhais, Miguel and Rosemary Lee. "Spectral and Procedural: A Perspective on Artificial Creativity Through Computational Art".
• Chia, Aleena. "Agency and Automation in Digital Game Production".
• Chow, Pei-Sze. "Ghost in the (Hollywood) machine: emergent applications of artificial intelligence in the film industry".
• Coelho, Inês Rebanda. "Authorship of fictional texts generated by AI".
• Feher, Katalin. "Narrow AI results in narrow creativity: Concepts of creative process in a decade’s perspective from media to art".
• Gallagher, Brad. "Do GPT-2s Dream of Electric Poetry?"
• Goddard, Valentine. "Art can shape how AI is governed".
• Ivanova, Nevena. "Computational Creativity: A Philosophical Study".
• Kadish, David. "Designing Endemic Robots: An Experiment in Sound".
• Koh, Immanuel. "AI-Urban-Sketching in the Age of COVID-19".
• Leach, Neil. "AI and The Limits of Human Creativity".
• Maraffi, Christopher. "Sherlock Frankenstein: Transmedia Character Design with AI Breeding Tools".
• McGarrigle, Conor. "Art Washing Machine Learning".
• Muia, Julian. "Downstream: New Developments in Algorithmic Composition and Music Streaming".
• Olszewska, Anna. "Reflections on machine situationism".
• Stephensen, Jan Løhmann. "Artificial Creativity, Anthropocentrism and Post-Creativity – The Political Stakes".
• Trillo, Roberto Alonso, Peter Nelson, Daniel Shanken, François Mouillot, Mathis Antony, Ryan Au, and Maya Duan. "Collaborative Artistic Production Using Generative Adversarial Networks".
• Wagman, Kelly B. "Ambii: An Ambient & Non-Anthropomorphic Digital Assistant".
• Wasielewski, Amanda. "What role can AI play in the creation and study of art?"
• Wellner, Galit. "Layers of Imagination".
• Willcox, Stacey. "Artificial Synaesthesia: An exploration of machine learning image synthesis for soundscape audio visualisation".

The conference also featured a virtual exhibition in Mozilla's Hubs with the following presentations:

• Emard, Justine. "Supraorganism"
• Partadiredja, Reza Arkan, Davor Ljubenkov, and Carlos Alejandro Entrena Serrano. "AI or Human?"
• Goddard, Valentine. "Introducing the 'AI on a Social Mission' conference".

The virtual exhibition was produced by Maria Engberg and Jay David Bolter within the research project "Virtual conferencing to promote research and scholarly exchange during the current pandemic and possible future disruptions".

This paper introduces the track on co-created and/or co-produced collaborative services within different types of organisations, from the public realm, to the private and third sector. We navigate this wide field in the wake of three main interpretations of what collaboration may entail: collaboration as an approach to conceive services, ie co-design, collaboration as way in which services are implemented and delivered, ie co-production, and collaboration as a way to raise awareness about issues of public interest, ie participation and democracy. The various papers submitted to this track are clustered according to these three domains: the part on co-design explores the development of tools and the inclusion of stakeholders, the issue of co-production mainly refers to the empowerment of individuals within professional networks and local communities, while questions of democracy and power relationships highlight the importance to address in future how service design practice for sharing and collaboration intersects and contributes to a larger societal development.

A re-materialisation of the visual in terms of viscosity is provided by this article. The argument is grounded in practical design processes from on-going research in the integration of archival material into AR/MR environments (Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality). This is an approach to emergent materiality not because new materials are invented but because existing visual, digital and traditional craft materials are re-configured. The archival material we use for this project is visual rather than textual, and it portrays moving bodies. The re-materialisation happens through experimentation with materials, affect and perception. Visual materialities, in this case viscosity, rely on a phenomenological approach to vision whereby design materials cannot be separated from the active perception of the designers, the participants and even the materials themselves. This article outlines the final iteration of the AffeXity project where glass was used as a design material to enhance viscous materiality. Viscosity is experienced as depth, layers, stickiness, reflections, motion, and an affective quality of dreaminess or the passage of time.

The Bronze Key art installation is the result of performative re-materializations of bodily data. This collaborative experiment in data encryption expands research into practices of archiving and critical discourses around open data. It integrates bodily movement, motion capture and Virtual Reality (VR) with a critical awareness of data trails and data protection. A symmetric cryptosystem was enacted producing a post-digital cipher system, along with archival artefacts of the encryption process. Material components for inclusion in the TEI Arts Track include: an audio file of text to speech of the raw motion capture data from the original movement sequence on cassette tape (The Plaintext), a 3D printed bronze shape produced from a motion captured gesture (The Encryption Key), and a printed book containing the scrambled motion capture data (The Ciphertext).

This paper contributes to the understanding of urban commons and how they might be (co)-designed. Insights from two cases are used to articulate how urban commons develop over time and to discuss how the approach of infrastructuring can enable urban commoning on a long-term basis. First, an overview of commons and urban commons is provided with a special focus on communing, as in, the understanding of commons as an ongoing process rather than a stable arrangement. Thereafter, the paper gives an overview of the participatory design community's findings about co-designing commons, with infrastructuring proposed as a possible approach. By looking at the development of two urban commons over time, the paper tentatively presents an understanding of urban commoning. This emerges as a process that entails the exploration, reification, and reworking of collaborative arrangements over time. It is a process that requires transparency and accountability, and its transformative potential in relation to urban governance should be carefully considered. From these findings, the paper suggests that prolonged infrastructuring efforts for urban commons need to: (1) foster the understanding of the temporal and fallible nature of arrangements; (2) support accountability and transparency over time; (3) recognize and address the installed base; and (4) articulate democratic and governance aspects in commoning.

Medea Vox, an academic podcast. Episode 24: Comics have been around for more than a hundred years. For a long time, comics were mainly viewed as light entertainment for kids, but today they can also be seen as an aesthetically ambitious art form. But are comics also a politically significant medium? In this Medea Vox episode, comics artist Daria Bogdanska and professor Magnus Nilsson talk about comics and politics. Can comics be used to criticize and think about society in new ways? Can comics articulate new voices, or reach out to those who are not taking part in political life? And which are the potentials and limitations of comics as a political art form?

Medea Vox, an academic podcast. Episode 23: In this Medea Vox episode, we discuss degrowth. How can we build societies where economic growth is no longer important? This year, the first of August was the date when we had used more from nature than our planet can renew in the entire year. Are we about to eradicate our own habitats? This conversation between scholars Miriam Lang, Ruth Kinna and Alicia Smedberg explores what needs to be done to avoid it.

This chapter turns to the concept of “empowerment” as a result of disenchantment with the concept of “development” in the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social change in the global South. It is a certainty that the proliferation of ICTs (mobile phones in particular) has opened up a range of possibilities and new avenues for individuals, aid agencies, and NGOs. However, overviews of communication supposedly for development reveal a field based on economic understandings of development biased toward techno-determinism. Moreover, these understandings lack sufficient critique and do not take larger contextual factors into account. Therefore, it is argued that empowerment is a better concept to draw upon in the critical study of ICTs and social change. However, empowerment is not an easy concept to define, and no analytical outline of the concept has been found in the existing body of literature. Addressing this lack, this chapter will trace the roots of empowerment in community psychology and in feminist and black power movements as well as explore different understandings of the concept from various disciplines. From this overview, the chapter suggests that empowerment should be studied on a) an intersectional level, b) a contextual level, c) an agency level, and d) a technological level. It further argues that these four levels intersect and must be studied in tandem to understand whether processes of empowerment are taking place, and if so, in what ways? The chapter ends by shortly applying these levels to a study involving market women’s use of mobile phones in Kampala.

This chapter departs from the dichotomy between techno-optimism and normalization and asks the questions how participation online has been – and can be – studied beyond this. The chapter focuses on the theory of media logics, how it has been and can be used when studying online participation. The chapter will end with a discussion of media logics locating it within the field of media and communication – increasingly a popular strand of mediatization.

Each of the collaboratively authored chapters of Applied Media Studies was produced through a series of interview-style questions that I, as editor, developed and circulated to the contributors. Through a dialogic process that took place in a deliberately conversational tone, I asked each contributor to answer questions related to a set of themes in the book as a whole, ranging from logistical concerns to methodological and theoretical problems. In this foundational chapter, I asked, “What does applied media studies mean to you? How and why did you start doing applied media studies? In your view, what is the theoretical, historical, and/or political rationale for reimagining humanistic media studies as an applied practice?” In addition to their written responses, contributors created short videos for a web-based companion to the book, hosted on the open-access Scalar platform (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/applied-media-studies/index).

This chapter serves as a conclusion by way of annotated compilation, gathering the contributors’ favorite resources for helping them, their colleagues, and their students do applied media studies work. I asked participants what conceptual models they have found helpful for extending and applying media theory as they move between making, writing, and teaching. Additional questions included, what articles, books, blogs, and Twitter streams would you urge readers to look into? And finally, what are the gaps in this field where you feel future research should be focused?

In this collaboratively authored chapter, contributors discuss why they do applied media studies, addressing both the great rewards and the significant challenges to shifting away from traditional models of humanistic research and teaching.

This chapter addresses the complex, sometimes unintended—but also potentially very rewarding—consequences of intervening into practices that are more commonly studied from a distance, and the political and ethical implications of this work. The case studies for this chapter explore what happens when media scholars become actively involved in the reshaping of media experiences and infrastructures, and in some sense become part of the very processes they seek to critique. Contributors were asked, has your applied media studies work ever produced truly unexpected results that raised unintended ethical or legal issues you had to address? How have you managed issues relating to Intellectual Property regulations with open, collaborative work online? Have you discovered any novel ethical challenges or responsibilities from putting work online—including objects created by people, living and deceased, from cultures that are different than your own? Have you ever been unexpectedly drawn into an applied media studies project as a participant in ways that redefined your understanding of your role as scholar, or expert, or lead investigator? How did you respond, and has this changed the way you work now?

While doing applied media studies generally requires far fewer financial resources than doing applied science, issues of funding and sustainability nonetheless play a significant role in these projects. The multidisciplinary teams assembled to create applied media projects need space, technology, supplies, and human capital to succeed, and the pipelines for securing those resources are particularly limited in the humanities. This chapter asks contributors how they have managed to attain the needed resources for their projects, and what kinds of institutional homes they have found to house them. Further, to cultivate the necessary team members as participants come and go, we discuss what kind of background, training, and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty members, is needed to do this kind of work.

In this chapter, contributors address the core challenges of collaborating across academic divisions such as humanities and science, bridging academic and community practices, and translating between the diverse stakeholders involved in these projects. Much of the recent research on problem-based collaboration and innovation has noted the value of bringing together teams of people with radically different forms of expertise to solve complex challenges (Johnson 2010; Davidson 2011; Ness 2012). Contributors address a common question asked by academics interested in applied media studies, who don’t know where to begin: how do you find good collaborators in different, perhaps unfamiliar disciplines? Further, once those collaborators are found, how do you overcome the typical siloes of universities structured by departments within divisions like “humanities” and “sciences” to build effective working relationships with your collaborators? How do you translate between fields with radically different training, terminology, and theories of knowledge? What does it take to develop a shared vocabulary?

The media landscape has changed tremendously. New companies—Apple, Google, Facebook, and so on—have entered the landscape, reshaping it from the ground, and disrupting the business models of the traditional media companies. Media as such are increasingly being designed, produced and consumed collaboratively. And as evidenced in the Internet of Things discourse, more and more objects become media.

We argue that algorithms are an outcome rather than a replacement of media logics, and ultimately, we advance this argument by connecting human agency to media logics. This theoretical contribution builds on the notion that technology, particularly algorithms are non-neutral, arguing for a stronger focus on the agency that goes into designing and programming them. We reflect on the limits of algorithmic agency and lay out the role of algorithms and agency for the dimensions and elements of network media logic. The article concludes with addressing questions of power, discussing algorithmic agency from both meso and macro perspectives.

Virtual Reality (VR) is once again causing a stir, with conflicting assertions over its potential to usher in a glorious posthuman phase of freedom or to immerse bodies wearing headsets in pure and meaningless violence. This paper integrates philosophies of affect and affective experiences in VR by means of a practical application of phenomenological reflection. The combination of phenomenology and affect is valuable for articulating the lived experience of something unprecedented or disorienting, and for expanding the language of critique. The practical affective experiences of VR are from one particular VR artwork: MAN A VR by Gibson / Martelli, which uses captured data from dancers performing the dance improvisation form Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) to animate the figures the VR world. SRT is also the movement practice facilitating philosophical reflections on the experience of being in the VR world. In this paper, passages directly describing moments of experience in MAN A VR extracted directly from research journals act as affective counterpoints to the theoretical discussion. The result is an expansion of the somatic register of VR, at the same time as a grounding of concepts from affect theory within contemporary digital culture.

In 2013, Parvin Ardalan, a former journalist and civil-rights activist from Iran, launched a project in Malmö, Sweden called 100 Years of Immigrant Women’s Life and Work – or, Women Making History for short. Ardalan was Malmö’s first ‘safe-haven writer in residence’ from 2010 to 2012. In 2007, she was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for her work campaigning for the equal rights of men and women in Iran. At the time of the project launch, we, the authors, were involved in the Living Archives research project at Malmö University, which was rethinking the archive as a social resource. We were invited by Parvin and fellow activists to be partners in the work of documentating activity for Women Making History, alongside a few other Malmö-based organisations. This article recounts the movement’s engagement in rewriting Malmö’s history – a rewriting that focused on the lives and work of immigrant women over the last 100 years from a feminist and activist perspective.

This article explores existing and emerging frames of writing history involving a push for new modes of telling and writing history/histories. This, from the point of view of a recent movement, in short named Women Making History, launched in Malmö, Sweden in 2013 aiming to cover a 100-year period, from when immigration began until the present day. The movement - engaged in activism and archival work and research around the lives and work of women immigrants in the city - took off in 2013 with support from authors engaged in a Living Archives research project, and formally ended, though some activity continues, with a book publication in 2016. With the initiator of the movement Feminist Dialogue Malmö University researchers (mainly the two authors and students) have been documenting activities and workshops over hree years, revealing the voicing of ambivalent identities that wish to maintain a plurality and openness of identifications and directions. These voices do not want to be framed as ‘outsiders’, ‘homogenized others’ or ‘victimised strangers’, and struggle with a feeling of being amended to a more homogenous national history – an ambiguous predicament which is investigated in this article through diverse ways of trying to understand how belonging is developed in the notions of multidirectionality, multilogues, amendments and re/framing.

This article reveals a multi layered design process that occurs at the intersection between postcolonial/decolonial theory and a version of digital sketching called Embodied Digital Sketching (EDS). The result of this particular intersection of theory and practice is called Bitter & Sweet, a Mixed Reality design prototype using cultural heritage material. Postcolonial and decolonial strategies informed both analytic and practical phases of the design process. A further contribution to the design field is the reminder that design interventions in the current political and economic climate are frequently bi-directional: designers may enact, but simultaneously external events intervene in design processes. Bitter & Sweet reveals intersecting layers of power and control when design processes deal with sensitive cultural topics.

This report aims at evaluating the Co-Lab about circular economy and reuse, organized within the frame of Social Innovation Skåne project between March and June 2016.

Medea Vox, an academic podcast. Episode 21: Fiction holds the ability of imagining alternative futures. Through comics, novels and videogames, we can explore social and technical “What If’s.” In this Medea Vox episode, we discuss how fiction can contribute to our thinking about the future in ways which other schools of thought – such as the scientific – cannot.

This Preface to the Living Archives publication on Openness raises questions and controversies around open data and publication as an academic and expressive process. It begins by asking: why produce a publication on openness? Or, rather 3 versions, because the collected articles appeared as a series on medium.com (1/3), as a freely downloadable PDF (2/3), and finally as a limited hand bound print run of approximately 30 volumes (3/3). These are iterations on openness comprising 18 peer-reviewed contributions existing, to cite Jean Luc Nancy, “between exposed thought and knotty intimacy” within a Commerce of Thinking (Nancy 2009, 3). These 3 versions travel across materialities. They are re-mediated, but to me it feels like a sort of de-mediation – a stripping away – as we moved over time from the digital versions toward the print version. Video had to be unspooled into image frames, audio into fragmented text transcriptions. These iterations render Nancy’s argument multiple both in form and in voice, without a doubt “born in agitation and anxiety, in the fermentation of a form” (ibid) but not in search of anything as unified as a coherent style or position. The contributions demonstrate the political groundedness of research data, and its cloudiness, rather than the collective fiction of the transparency of data in the Cloud.

A political, performative and affective landscape is revealed in this chapter as a way of approaching the topic of performing the digital: from the macro of the upheaval caused by Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass data surveillance to the micro of a phenomenological account of a crisis following an artistic performance using mobile media. “Performing Encryption” is a response to working as a dancer and philosopher with mobile networked digital media that can be read as a part of a larger narrative of transitioning from one state to another. The state of viewing the fine interweaving of mobile technologies in our lives as a positive expression of social choreographies gives way to a state where it is impossible to regard the potential for surveillance and capture of daily activities as anything but provocative, troubling or even threatening. The risk is not just the “capture all” aspects of dataveillance, but of increasing control over gestural and affective exchanges in urban life. In saying networked technologies, I point not just to mobile phones but also to the Cloud and the Internet-of-Things which, in combination, are potentially devastating from the perspective of embodied agency. This narrative of questioning and transition is typical of others arising at the beginning of a century, let alone a millennium. It is no longer possible to avoid asking what we have created. And how we can respond to the technological and cultural conditions of our world.

This collection brings together academics, archivists, artists, and activists whose thought and practices make critical intervention into cultural phenomenon of open data. The sub-title of this publication – politics /practices / poetics – reveals a close entwinement between thought and practice, between thinking and making. The contri-butions offer critical perspectives combined with implications for practice, or they in themselves are practices (such as performances, discussions, acts of care, or visualisations). Each contribution is an open data project in action. Openness is part of the Living Archives research project.http://livingarchives.mah.se/ https://medium.com/the-politics-practices-and-poetics-of-openness

These guidelines are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, for civil servants and facilitators in cities working with experimental processes to tackle complex challenges. They aim to support the everyday practice of collaboratively experimenting and learning how to create more sustainable and inclusive cities.

This article considers archival performances rather than archives as places or repositories. This is done by expanding reflections on affect and by framing three specific archival performance practices: re-enactment, affective doubling, and surrogacy. The topic of The New Human is approached through the complex materiality of contemporary memory practices. This is the scholarly publication associated with the presentation of the same name given at The New Human Symposium co-curated by Medea of Malmö University and Moderna Museet Malmö in August 2016.

Purpose This paper compares two boundary organizations situated in Malmö (Sweden) and oriented towards opening production. Particularly, it looks at how the two organizations tried to establish and communicate their boundaries during their official opening events, which were structured according to the format of Hackathon. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted an ethnographic approach and followed the two events, observing and interacting with organizers and participants. The findings reported here draw upon data collected through direct observation, the authors’ experience as participants, unstructured conversations, email exchanges. Findings This paper analyses the two events in order to show how different cultures of opening production lead to different ways of performing Hackathons and, consequently, how these events affect the process of establishing and communicating the organizational boundaries. Originality/value The paper looks at the potential of events structured according to the format of Hackathon as a way for boundary organizations to position themselves

The phase evolution in a zirconium–50 deuterium (Zr–50D, at.%) alloy system during thermal cycling has been investigated using in situ high-resolution neutron powder diffraction. The results showed that the peritectoid reaction α-Zr + δ-ZrD → γ-ZrD previously suggested to occur at high temperatures does not take place in the system. Slow cooling, from high temperatures (≥520 K) to room temperature at a rate of 5 K min–1, promoted the γ-hydride formation rather than fast cooling as reported earlier. In contrast to the observation that the δ-hydride present in the system remained at temperatures up to 740 K, the produced γ phase transformed to δ-hydride in the temperature range of 370 K to 559 K, with the transformation completing at approximately 559 K. It is confirmed that the formation of the γ-hydride was reproducible with slow cooling, and a diffusion-controlled sluggish δ-to γ-hydride transformation is suggested to be responsible for the favorable development of γ-hydride during slow cooling.

Reclusion and openness—an oxymoron, one might think. However, in the course of this essay, I attempt to test these notions on the life trajectory of the African-American classical pianist, Eugene Haynes, who befriended an even more well-known artist, the Danish writer Karen Blixen (also known under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen). Haynes crossed continents for work and adventure in the midst of the Cold War, and now with a base in Denmark, he continued to nurture his friendship with Blixen and her secretary, Clara Selborn, from 1952 and over the next ten years until Blixen’s death in 1962. Over many holidays and work trips in Denmark, he used Selborn’s house in the small fishing village of Dragør, located south of Copenhagen (while Selborn stayed with Blixen in Rungstedlund), to practice the piano, study music, and in between, travel around Europe giving concerts.

The MEDEA Studio was a research centre founded at Malmö University. It focused on collaborative media and design to promote research and practice in connection with its surrounding environment for better innovation and outreach. During its history, MEDEA has undergone several changes leading to diverse challenges. This field report examines MEDEA’s development from the perspectives of knowledge acquisition and learning with the aim to analyse factors for success and failures. As society and especially academia struggle with understanding how to innovate and connect, reflecting on the different instantiations of the MEDEA studio can bring insights for researchers, practitioners, administrators and the studio’s future development.

IntuiTweet (2009-2010) was a dance improvisation project using Twitter as a platform for movement exchange: tweets were written by small group of dancers to promote kinaesthetic and corporeal exchanges in public spaces. Geographically disparate bodies were linked only by a set of improvisatory practices and by Twitter on their mobile devices. The improvisations left traces in the form of words. Making sense of this project in the context of mobile media narratives, two questions fold back on each other: why consider mobile media narratives through a project based in dance? And why consider dance through the lens of mobile media narratives? In pursuing these parallel but inverse lines of questioning, both the sense of narrative and the understanding of the movement practices are transformed. Yet, the scope of this chapter extends beyond narrative and dance: in exploring the qualities of these embodied micro-narratives and what happens when they are exchanged, we can learn more about how we live in the world with our mobile media.

Information visualization, as a way of presenting different data types in an understandable form, has the potential to support the analysis of transportation data. Visualization can often help decision makers to efficiently analyse large amount of information. One application area of information visualization is to support the analysis of the transportation data and thus facilitate the decision-making process. Most of the previous studies in this area have focused on visualization of transportation infrastructures such as roads, bridges in order to enhance the public awareness regarding upcoming projects which makes it easier to reach a consensus on the high-level decisions. However, the main focus of this article is on methods for visualization of data generated by transportation simulation systems to support analysis of the consequences of applying different transport policy measures, such as the introduction of road user charging or investment in new infrastructure. In this work, we investigate how visualization techniques could address the challenges of transportation simulation data analysis in order to facilitate the decision-making process. For this purpose, we have applied the visualization methods to a real implemented agent-based transportation simulator called TAPAS. In this case study, we have analysed the visualization related requirements of users using a user-centric approach and the visualization tool has been designed and developed based on the identified requirements.

There is an internal, self-balanced stress known as residual stress (RS) that exists in all alloy systems without any external applied forces. Depending on the compressive or tensile nature and magnitude of the RS, it significantly affects the mechanical properties of the materials. Therefore, it is crucial to know the nature and magnitude of RS in material for safe and economical operation. In this work, we used unique, multipurpose, high energy (50-150 KeV) beamline I12-JEEP (Joint Engineering, Environment and Processing) at Diamond Light Source in UK with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Diffraction (EDXRD) setup to map up the RS states in one of the most popular titanium alloys with a code name Ti6Al4V. This type of titanium alloy is widely used in biomedical and aerospace industry because of their excellent combination of a high strength/weight ratio and good corrosion resistance. The Ti6Al4V which we were investigated are produced using electron beam melting (EBM) technique as a function of EBM processing parameters. In addition to relation between RS and processing parameters of EBM, the hydride formation versus processing parameters and as well as the effect of residual stress to the hydride precipitation in EBM built Ti6Al4V were investigated. To find out the effect of EBM processing parameters to the residual stress development, various samples produced with different beam size, scanning speed and different building thickness were investigated. From each type of the sample four specimens were prepared and three of them loaded with hydrogen in different concentrations, i.e. the hydrogen concentration of the various samples are 262, 772, 951 and 1410 ppm. Other than these alloy samples we also measured clean and hydrided original powder samples which are used for make these solid samples in our studies. After data collection, the whole pattern fitting method Rietveld and Pawely were performed with structure analysis software package Topas-Academic and GSAS. .