Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia. Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia. Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

An open knowledge list for all to add to, use, and share with others.

List of AI in: Academia, Technology and Activism - An Openly shared Resource with Peers. (Title to be changed soon) The Cultural Production of Art and AI: Investigating various methods such as: computer vision, artificial intelligence, neurorobotics, speech recognition, generative writing, ge...

Playfully Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCIS_QuklPMwuEnfnjjHKfg?sub_confirmation=1

Twitter: @FormingFiction

Watch Some Stuff: Extra Credits, Because Games Matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6xz58O4xq8

Bibliography: Hunicke, Robin/LeBlanc, Marc/Zubek, Robert, MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research, https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf

6-11 Framework: https://www.academia.edu/1571687/THE_6-11_FRAMEWORK_A_NEW_METHODOLOGY_FOR_GAME_ANALYSIS_AND_DESIGN

Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens. A study of the play-element in culture, http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/1474/homo_ludens_johan_huizinga_routledge_1949_.pdf

Dillon, Roberto, On the Way to Fun. An Emotion-Based Approach to Successful Game Design, https://www.amazon.com/Way-Fun-Emotion-Based-Approach-Successful/dp/1568815824

Kotte, Andreas, Theaterwissenschaft. Eine Einführung, https://tinyurl.com/y43bdvj4

Jung, C. G., and Joan Chodorow, Jung on Active Imagination, https://tinyurl.com/y627n6gp

Music: "The Process" by LAKEY INSPIRED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daWvummA8ZQ

"Pokemon Gym" by Mikel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DVpys50LVE

"Hopes & Dreams" by Jonas Munk Lindbo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNp4_pFkM5Q

Other: Ace Attorney Font: BMatSantos

http://www.kojimaproductions.jp/en/

docx Afro-pessimism Reading List 6 Pages Afro-pessimism Reading List connect to download or reset password Academia © 2017

The world of academia is starting to pick up on the concept that humanity is unknowingly cruising on a train ride to doomsday, a surefire encounter with collapse of society based upon climate crises brought on by exponential climate change.

Philosopher Rosi Braidotti of Utrecht University in the Netherlands delivered the 2017 Tanner Lectures on Human Values this spring at the Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.  Her talks are jointly titled “Posthuman, All Too Human.” The first, “Memoirs of a Posthumanist,” took place on Wednesday, March 1; the second, “Aspirations of a Posthumanist,” on Thursday, March 2. Professor Braidotti was joined by Professors Joanna Radin (History of Medicine, History) and Rüdiger Campe (German, Comparative Literature) for further discussion on Friday, March 3.   Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her published works include Patterns of Dissonance: An Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy (1991); Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994; 2d ed. 2011); Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002); Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006); La philosophie, lá où on ne l’attend pas (2009); Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (2011); and The Posthuman (2013). In 2016 she coedited Conflicting Humanities with Paul Gilroy.     Professor Braidotti has been an elected board member of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes since 2009. She is also an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Academia Europaea. She has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Helsinki and the University of Linkoping. In 2005, she was knighted into the Order of the Netherlands by Queen Beatrix.

In this feature essay, Ninna Meier reflects on the materiality of the writing – and re-writing – process in academic research.

http://www.egs.edu Benjamin H. Bratton, born 1968, is an American theorist, sociologist and professor of visual arts, contemporary social and political theory, philosophy, and design.

The Post-Anthropocene: The Turing-incomplete Orchid Mantis Evolves Machine Vision. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2015.

Benjamin H. Bratton, (b. 1968), is an American theorist, sociologist, and professor of visual arts, contemporary social and political theory, philosophy, and design. His research deals with computational media and infrastructure, design research management & methodologies, classical and contemporary sociological theory, architecture and urban design issues, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies.

Bratton completed his doctoral studies in the sociology of technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara​, and was the Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo! before expanding his cross-disciplinary research and practice in academia. He taught in the Department of Design/Media Art at UCLA from 2003-2008, and at the SCI Arc​ (Southern California Institute of Architecture)​ for a decade, and continues to teach as a member of the Visiting Faculty. While at SCI Arc, Benjamin Bratton and Hernan Diaz-Alonso co-founded the XLAB courses, which placed students in laboratory settings where they could work directly and comprehensively in robotics, scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, and cellular systems​. Currently, in addition to his professorship at EGS, Bratton is an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Dieg​o, where he also directs the Center for Design and Geopolitics, partnering with the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology​.

In addition to his formal positions, Benjamin H. Bratton is a regular visiting lecturer at numerous universities and institutions including: Columbia University, Yale University, Pratt Institute, Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of California, Art Center College of Design, Parsons The New School for Design, University of Michigan, Brown University, The University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Bauhaus- University, Moscow State University, Moscow Institute for Higher Economics, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

Bratton's current projects focus on the political geography of cloud computing, massively- granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. In his most recent book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015), Bratton asks the question, "What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities?​" and in response, offers the proposition "that smart grids, cloud computing, mobile software and smart cities, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and other types of apparently unrelated planetary-scale computation can be viewed as forming a coherent whole—an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new geopolitical architecture.​"

Other more recent texts include the following: Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics, On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life: Object, Image, Superimposition, Deep Address, What We Do is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualization, Geoscapes & the Google Caliphate: On Mumbai Attacks, Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apohenia and Suspicious Images/ Latent Interfaces (with Natalie Jeremijenko), iPhone City, Logistics of Habitable Circulation (introduction to the 2008 edition of Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics). As well, recent online lectures include: 2 or 3 Things I Know About The Stack, at Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London, and University of Southampton;Cloud Feudalism at Proto/E/Co/Logics 002, Rovinj, Croatia; Nanoskin at Parsons School of Design; On the Nomos of the Cloud at Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, École Normale- Superiore, Paris, and MOCA, Los Angeles; Accidental Geopolitics at The Guardian Summit, New York; Ambivalence and/or Utopia at University of Michigan and UC Irvine, and Surviving the Interface at Parsons School of Design.

The road to a PhD is a common source of frustration. It is time to acknowledge and contest this experience as the outcome of a disciplinarian process.

As a faceless PhD student in a social science-y department, I repeatedly catch myself with the strangest metaphors to describe my research experience. The latest one is of academic work as a love relationship with a RealDoll: a lifestyle requiring sustained commitment and a rich (puppetry) skill set, to spin a tapestry of memories around an elegantly irrelevant act of masturbation.

The more I delve into this malaise, the more I become dissatisfied with the folk psychology of peer support inside a PhD community, with older students relating how their ideas got scrapped — sometimes beyond recognition — under the weight of what goes under the name of ‘constructive criticism’ (that, not unlike construction, requires a previous hollowing out of an organic soil to lay concrete foundations). These tales remind me a bit of stories of bullying in the army: we might all have been affected by it but, after the fact, end up looking back at it with some nostalgia, perhaps even a hint of gratitude, and rationalize it as a ‘formative’ experience. Lurking beneath the informal practices of peer support, however, lies buried a much deeper question of knowledge politics, and one that PhD students stupendously fail at engaging politically.

The PhD student is, essentially, a candidate for co-optation in academia. The mechanism is such that the PhD candidate is successfully co-opted upon favorable judgment by at least two other peers, an internal and an external examiner. In this sense, the process of becoming an academic is remarkably similar to that of joining a Rotary Club, or a circle of Freemasons (which, let’s face it, are not the most inclusive organizations in the world!). This somewhat paternalistic mechanism imbues a number of different aspects of the doctoral experience, down to the student-supervisor relationship, which in turn raises a number of political issues. Unfortunately, the failure to apprehend the structural constraints that are embedded in the very set-up for a PhD makes it so that any political points are simply driven underground, buried in the passing rants that PhD students share with one another in fleeting moments of bonding, with the secrecy and truth that accompanies anything shared in vino veritas.

In my tenure as a PhD student, I have possibly learnt one thing about what makes for a ‘good’ PhD. A good PhD is one that turns a captivating idea into a piece of writing that is so dry and mind-numbingly boring as to be utterly unpalatable to its author – who often feels estranged from the final product of his or her multi-year toil – and that is only read (if at all) by others who have an obligation to read it in a professional capacity. No one cares about PhD theses; in fact, even publishers routinely dismiss raw PhD dissertations. Instead, they request a ‘revision’ that amounts to the purging of one’s original idea from the ‘noise’ it has been drowned in, in order to get the academic title.

The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yieldedinnovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of theimage. These applications rely on algorithmically defined relations between the viewing subject and the world viewed, offering robust alternatives to the visual economies of thepast. If we take seriously Heidegger’s insights regarding the Welt-bild as a metaphor for themodern era, the algorithmic reconfiguration of subject-object relations in this emerging visual regime potentially offers insights – and a metaphoric alternative – through which wecan reflect upon the current era. This essay uses two entry points to explore this possiblereconfiguration, and with it, the question of value. Downloadable applications such asPhotosynth aggregate location-tagged photographs into a near-seamless whole, and offer a way to consider such issues as collaborative authorship of the image, unstable points of view,and the repositioning of subject-object relationships – all elements that fundamentally challenge Western representational norms dominant in the modern era. In this new regime,the spatial referents of greatest value are points of uniqueness sought out and built upon by the program’s algorithms -- and not those perceived by the viewer. The viewer is in turnfree to explore an extensive and dynamic image space unconstrained by (and indeed, withoutaccess to) an authorized or ‘correct’ viewing position. A second case, built upon certainaugmented reality applications, works by ‘recognizing’ particular spaces and, through the useof computationally enhanced viewing screens, superimposing new images over real space. Inthis case, a system of virtual spatial annotation depends upon the ‘correct’ positioning of the viewer (and portable computing device) in the world. The virtual image gives the vieweraccess to an encoded and location-based domain of signification, augmenting her encounters with the world and potentially transforming the meaning of its sights. The two cases standin a rough reciprocal relationship, one loosening our spatial moors and leaving us to wander

The image that conjures the weird for me, above and beyond all others, is the rift in reality. The tear in the space time continuum that swallows the Starship Enterprise. The wardrobe that opens to the land of Narnia. The dimensional experiment that gushes alien monsters out in to the Black Mesa research facility. The tear in the fabric of the real, in whatever guise it represents itself, is the true essence of the weird.

Attendees at the recent Weird Council conference at Birkbeck University might disagree. As an event examining the work of novelist China Miéville, they might have felt compelled to argue for that emblematic image of the New Weird, the tentacle: the monstrous appendage that emerges from the rift to disturb the mundane order of things.

Weird Council was remarkable for many reasons. First as an academic conference dedicated to the work of a writer who has been publishing for only a little over a decade, and one who belongs, as Miéville does, solidly in a tradition of genre writing that is rarely recognised in academia. Second, it brought together a remarkable diversity of specialists with a shared interest in Miéville's work; academics, political activists and of course the fandom that have played such a major part in evangelising him to the wider world.

2012 sees the thirtieth anniversary of the untimely death, at the age of 53, of Philip K. Dick – a figure whose cultural impact within and beyond science fiction remains difficult to overestimate. Dick’s academic and popular reputation continues to grow, as a number of recent monographs, several biographies and an unceasing flow of film adaptations testify.

Yet while his status as “The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet” (Paul Williams) is rarely questioned, scholarly criticism of Dick has not kept pace with recent developments in academia – from transnationalism to adaptation studies, from the cultural turn in historiography to the material turn in the humanities. Too often Dick remains shrouded in clichés and myth. Indeed, rarely since the seminal contributions of Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin have our engagements with Dick proved equal to the complexity of his writing – an oeuvre indebted to the pulps and Goethe, Greek philosophy and the Beats – that calls for renewed attempts at a history of popular culture. The aim of this conference is to contribute to such an undertaking.

The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Nielsen argues that networked digital tools, such as discussion boards and online marketplaces, can make it easier for scientists to pool their data, share methodologies, and find far-flung collaborators. Even non-scientists are participating in large-scale citizen science projects. In Nielsen’s view, however, public policy has yet to catch up to technology. The digital environment will amplify our collective intelligence, but only if there are incentives for people to share. Editorial assistant Lindsey Gilbert asks Nielsen about what science looks like now, the changing role of academia, and whether collective intelligence might also transform politics.

I'm looking for examples of websites that have successfully enhanced a research community (academic or artistic) with a dynamic online/social/mutual-portfolio presence. Blog and social media based hubs, perhaps, that showcase the possibilities of web portfolio/research integration for academic and creative purposes. I've been asked to help implement a website/blogging platform for a community of 20 MFA students.

Basically I'd like to gather up some examples of dynamic websites attached to academia (or similar i.e. the arts). These examples will be then passed on to my superiors with an eye to developing our own platform that takes the best approaches we discover and adds/mutates them to our needs. The cream of the crop in terms of design, content and implementation.

The perfect fit would (perhaps) give each student their own (blog) space from day one, and have the content they choose to share dynamically interface with the other students as the course unfolds. We might use it as a portfolio format (the students are studying art and writing) or we might integrate it with the theoretical components of the course, use it to share tutorial feedback, or even open the reading we do to the wider world.

Ideally we will do this cheaply, with open-source software.

Send me some impressive and inspiring examples!

Cheers in advance

“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” - Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

What are artists to gain from taking a PhD? How does the mantle of ‘artistic research’ enable art objects and those invested in them? And where does art’s autonomy reside when its criticality comes from within an academic institution? Over the last 20 years art has eased its way into academia. Past the door of the artist’s studio and up the back stairs it tiptoed until, in a very bold move, it seated itself in the commissioner’s chair. Where once art reacted against academies from the outside, art, and the artists who make it, now work from within the institution. Artists interested in pursuing a doctoral degree will have heard time and again about ‘the critical function of art’. Indeed, many theorists would insist on art being defined from this state of opposition (the ‘avant-garde’). But to understand the potential of art today it becomes impossible to separate it from the academic institutions that use its name to label their distinctive, often daring, new departments. Goldsmith’s Art Writing MFA and the RCA’s Critical Writing in Art & Design being two of the freshest – some might say hippest – examples.

To begin producing ‘new knowledge’, PhD researchers often need to pursue contradictory goals. A strong research question poses not the trajectory to a definitive answer, but a principle by which the researcher may begin to generate knowledge. This becomes especially slippery when that ‘knowledge’ is woven into an artistic practice, or when the art objects created by that practice are assumed to qualify the research. How does one invest research in projects that have yet to be realised? Practice-based PhDs hide another stumbling block, usually one based on the expectations of the artist: the belief that time invested in a research degree should improve the quality of practice, as well as strengthen one’s grasp of theory. The distinction between the practice and theoretical components of a PhD can vary wildly, and although on paper they each glean 50% of the final mark severing them into definite halves can be an unwieldy, often impossible, task. In the RCA’s Department of Communication Art & Design for instance, projects regularly emerge that blur the line between the written and ‘practical’ components of research. A recent edition of critical journal Texte Zur Kunst focused on artistic research declared, “Philosophy and art share the conviction that cognition requires a material form.” A practice-based PhD may have a smaller word count than its non-practical equivalent, but as final exhibitions are documented and literature reviews are spell checked, the boundary between art object and critical reflection will have hopefully elided into a single, successful, conglomeration. As a practice-based researcher myself, with two years of the academy under my belt, I’ve found that the primary method of answering these concerns is to reflect them back at the institution. Research does not take place in isolation. As with any treasured job it is the people that make a PhD worth undertaking. If you are lucky – and let’s admit it, fewer things are harder to predict than luck – the artists and academics that make up your department will be driven by similar desires as you are. Of course, I could spend the rest of this short article on the restrictions of labelling yourself a graduate of the RCA, Goldsmiths or the Slade. But reflecting back the conditions of research at the institutions that produce them comes closer to addressing what really makes academies function: exchange. To paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not what academia can do for you—ask what you can do for your academia.’ Productive exchange begins by giving your all, whilst always expecting those around you to do the same. In terms of the market, artistic practice often inhabits an obscure space, cut off from the concerns of art galleries, of buyers, sellers and the aesthetically motivated public. The main benefit of taking up a practice-based research position is exposing one’s practice to the eyes of others. But this exposure always focuses both ways. Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, in The Postmodern Condition, “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” Criticality – the enactment of research – begins in the process of exchange, a goal which, if Lyotard is to be believed, should be held in higher esteem than the art market. Taking a practice-based PhD means investing time and knowledge with other practitioners, often other artists who, having undertaken their research years before, now enact their modes of exchange as tutors, professors and PhD supervisors. Research degrees are not always the best way to fortify the foundations of an artist’s practice. Indeed, many would argue that the very principle of artistic practice within the academy is to rock those foundations, even raze certain principles of practice to the ground. But when PhD researchers are supported to develop and sustain their thought from within their art it can often be the supervisor or established academic artist who has to rethink their assumptions, rather than the other way around. Personal exploration, issuing from practice, becomes valid as PhD research when its significance is a significance shared. A significance exchanged is a significance enhanced.

Reports of the demise of the humanities are exaggerated, suggest these panelists, but there may be reason to fear its loss of relevance. Three scholars whose work touches a variety of disciplines and with wide knowledge of the worlds of academia and publishing ponder the meaning and mission of the humanities in the digital age. Getting a handle on the term itself proves somewhat elusive. Alison Byerly invokes those fields involved with “pondering the deep questions of humanity,” such as languages, the arts, literature, philosophy and religion. Steven Pinker boils it down to “the study of the products of the human mind.” Moderator David Thorburn wonders if the humanities are those endeavors that rely on interpretive rather than empirical research, but both panelists vigorously make the case that the liberal arts offer increasing opportunities for data-based analysis.

Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time:

In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.

These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities’, and therefore countries’, research capacity.