Final Report
The Interactive Mind: a Series of AHRC Workshops
1. Intellectual Overview
1.1 According to the
interactive conception of mind, our minds are shaped in subtle and fundamental
ways by the details of our gross bodily form, our habits of action and
intervention, and the enabling web of social, cultural, and technological
scaffolding in which we are evolutionarily, historically, developmentally, and
here-and-now situated. Intelligent activities such as reasoning, imagination
and creativity are not (or are not simply) a matter of processing information
internally, but of manipulating and responding to external structures,
sometimes in ways that involve bodily skills as much as inner reflection or
planning. In effect, to take the interactive viewpoint is to place in question the
conventional assumption that thinking goes on entirely within the mind, as
traditionally conceived. Rather, human intelligence emerges out of complex and iterated
interactions between inner and environmental factors, over different
time-scales.
1.2 The interactive paradigm
already has a foothold in many arts and humanities disciplines. In archaeology,
feminist theory, history, linguistics, literary studies, museum studies,
philosophy, the visual and performance arts, and elsewhere, the interactive
viewpoint has begun to make itself felt. In addition, the view is already
important in various branches of psychological science. Influential models in
artificial intelligence, cognitive and social psychology, human-computer
interaction and other fields suggest that intelligence and even consciousness
are essentially a matter of interactions with the environment.
1.3 The arts and
humanities have always studied minds. Indeed, it would be bizarre to suggest
that, for example, novelists, critical theorists, musicians, visual artists, or
social and political historians do not explore or illuminate how minds are
realised within their cultural and historical contexts. But it is precisely with the interactive turn in our
understanding of mind that a fundamentally deep
theoretical contribution from the arts and humanities becomes available. Within
the interactive paradigm, there is a sense in which the study of mind and the
study of its contexts become theoretically
inseparable. If there is no fixed essence of mind that exists prior to its embodied,
historical and cultural manifestations, then minds are made in the ongoing dialectic
with other agents and objects – in short the environment both natural and
cultural. Thus, from the interactive perspective, research into the mind has an
essential arts and humanities dimension.
1.4 No one discipline
has the intellectual resources to deal with all the implications of the shift
in approach that the interactive perspective demands. This genuinely cross-disciplinary
idea needs to be explored in a genuinely cross-disciplinary context. With its
emphasis on the further development of the paradigm within the arts and
humanities, the overarching goal of the series of AHRC workshops was to bring
together researchers in the arts and humanities, alongside representatives from
the sciences, to provide such a context.
2. Organisation
2.1 Having been asked by
the AHRB (as it was) to organise a series of workshops on the topic of The
Interactive Mind, Mike Wheeler established a steering group – the so-called core group – the role of which was to
oversee the organisation of the workshop series and to contribute as
appropriate to the production of documents required by the AHRC as part of its feedback
and consultation processes. The membership of the core group was based
initially on that of the highly productive 2003 Interactive Mind focus group
convened by the AHRB – based on, but not identical with: two members of the
original focus group were too committed on other fronts, and the membership was
expanded to introduce fresh perspectives on the issues. The core group that
operated throughout the workshop series itself consisted of Prof. Margaret
Boden (Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, Informatics, Sussex),
Prof. Andy Clark (Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh),
Prof. Eric Clarke (Music, Sheffield), Dr. Chris Gosden (Archaeology, Oxford),
Prof. Jim Hurford (Linguistics, Edinburgh), Prof. David Papineau (Philosophy, King’s
College London), Dr. Mike Wheeler (Philosophy, Stirling), and Prof. Harvey
Whitehouse (Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University,
Belfast).
2.2 In order to
publicise the workshop series and to provide a focus for further interest, a
web site was set up at:
http://www.philosophy.stir.ac.uk/staff/m-wheeler/interactive-mind.php
This site is still live, and continues to
attract regular attention, even after the completion of the workshop series. The
workshops were also advertised through postings to various email lists. Word-of-mouth
in the arts and humanities community at large (and between members of AHRC
committees) was also important. Among other things, this activity succeeded in connecting
the AHRC Interactive Mind initiative with various individuals and teams (e.g.
the Cambridge cognitive archaeology group) whose research was readily
identifiable as part of the wider interactive turn, but whose work, largely through
institutionalised lack of communication between disciplines, was previously
unknown to (at least most of) the core group members.
2.3 At the end of the
workshop series itself, a core group meeting was convened to guide the writing of
the 2005 Interactive Mind Outline Programme Specification (see separate
document). For this purpose, the core group was expanded further to include Prof.
Sally Shuttleworth (English Literature, Sheffield; about to
become the Head of the Humanities Division, Oxford) and Paul Brown (Artist and Writer Specialising in Art and
Technology; until recently Visiting Fellow at the School of History of
Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck, London; currently Visiting Professor,
Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, Sussex). From the contributions
that these individuals made to the workshops, it was clear that the initiative
would benefit from their closer involvement at this stage.
3. Character of the
Workshops
3.1 As envisaged in the co-ordinator’s
original proposal, three workshops took place. These were at the University of
Sheffield (8-9 April 2005), the University of Edinburgh (10-11 June
2005), and the Sussex Arts Club, Brighton (19-20 July 2005).
3.2.
The key strategic organisational principles for the workshops were as follows:
a)
Each
of the events should have a local organiser or organisers, whose primary responsibility
was to be the practical organisation of the speakers, venue, accommodation, and
so on.
b)
The
invited speakers and targeted cross-disciplinary themes for the workshops were to
be determined in consultation with the national coordinator, with the
constraint that the chosen themes should reflect, explore, and/or appropriately
extend the key research areas identified in the 2003 Interactive Mind Outline Programme
Specification produced on the basis of the aforementioned 2003 Interactive Mind
focus group meeting. It was expected that further cross-disciplinary themes
would emerge during discussion at the workshops.
c)
Given
the fact that the interactive mind perspective is important in certain
scientific disciplines, it was legitimate and profitable that some speakers should
be drawn from those areas, but where this was so it was to be ensured that the
themes explored by those speakers were such as to resonate with the arts and
humanities community.
d)
Taken
as a whole, the workshops should be designed to enable rich cross-disciplinary
participation involving the broad range of arts and humanities disciplines.
e)
Taken
as a whole, the workshops should involve a balanced combination of invited and open
participation. (It was decided that all presenting speakers should be invited,
i.e., there were no submitted papers.)
f)
Ample
time should reserved for discussion.
g)
Taken
as a whole, the workshops should make contact with an international perspective
on the issues.
3.3 The goals embedded
in these principles were achieved, as indicated below.
3.4 The local organisers
were Eric Clarke (for Sheffield), Mike Wheeler and Andy Clark (for Edinburgh),
and Jon Bird (for Sussex).
3.5 Participation at the
Sheffield workshop was entirely by invitation. The Edinburgh workshop involved
invited speakers and participants, but also participants who registered in
response to publicity. The Brighton workshop had a similar make-up to the Edinburgh
workshop.[1]
3.6 The disciplines
represented (either by speakers or by other participants) were as follows:
§
Sheffield (18 participants in
all, including speakers): anthropology, archaeology, English, French, Hispanic
Studies, history, linguistics, music, philosophy, psychology (developmental and
social), Russian and Slavonic Studies.
§
Edinburgh (41 participants in
all, including speakers): anthropology, archaeology, art and design, computer
science, cultural theory, dance, English, history, Hispanic studies,
human-computer interaction, informatics, linguistics, music, philosophy, religious studies,
sociology.
§
Brighton: (50 participants in all, including
speakers): architecture, art and design, computer science, cultural studies, fine
art, human-computer interaction, informatics, media and film studies, music,
philosophy, robotics.
3.7 An international
perspective was accessed through the presentations and contributions of invited
speakers from Australia, New Zealand and the USA, and through the contributions
of other participants from Germany and Spain.
3.8 Each of the
workshops succeeded in providing a platform for constructive intellectual
investigation of the interactive mind idea, within a rich and varied
disciplinary matrix involving the wide range of arts and humanities disciplines
alongside certain areas of the sciences. Discussions were extensive, lively,
open and constructive, confirming again the broad interest that the idea
commands both within the arts and humanities community, and at its borders with
science. The workshops were organised primarily around the themes identified at
the original 2003 focus group meeting, but, as expected, several new cross-disciplinary
themes (e.g. ‘The Artwork and the Performance as Research’; see below) emerged
during the course of the meetings.[2]
3.9 In addition to the
strategic organisational principles embedded in the original workshops
proposal, another came to the fore, namely to address the question of how
research in the interactive mind paradigm may resonate beyond academia. To
explore this issue, it was decided that the Brighton workshop should include an
evening of talks, discussions, performances and films, organised around the
idea of the interactive mind, and open to
the general public. This strategy was rewarded. There were 50 people registered
at the workshop, but over 120 attended the very-well-received evening event
(more details below; the performance programme is contained in the appendix). In
this context it is also worth noting that the workshop series has attracted the
attention of Art and Mind (http://www.artandmind.org/index2.html),
an organisation which produces very successful cross-disciplinary festivals and
symposia, oriented towards the general public, on topics such as ‘Language,
Poetry and the Brain,’ ‘Religion, Art and the Brain,’ and ‘Humour, Art and the
Brain’. Mike Wheeler is currently in discussion with Art and Mind about an interactive mind dimension to their Spring 2006
festival (to be held in Winchester) on the theme of ‘Space, Architecture and
the Brain.’ Whatever form this dimension takes, it is envisaged that it will
involve a number of contributors to the AHRC workshop series.
4. Themes
4.1 Among the many cross-disciplinary
themes that were explored during the workshops, the following emerged as
central to the discussions, and thus as prominent candidates for further
exploration. In various ways these consolidate, reflect, extend and deepen the themes
identified in the 2003 draft programme specification.
4.2 The Language of Interaction: At all three workshops there were talks
and discussions which highlighted the point that the term ‘Interactive Mind’ is
in truth home to more than one theoretical perspective on mind. Some approaches
wish to preserve the idea of a mind as an essentially ‘inner’ phenomenon, but
one that is nevertheless shaped and sculpted in fundamental ways by its embodiment and by the environment in
which it is historically, evolutionarily, developmentally and here-and-now
situated. By contrast, other approaches wish to see the interactions and
inter-relations between the supposedly ‘inner’ and the supposedly ‘outer’
elements as being so tight and reciprocally determining that the very distinction
between an inner mind and an outer world becomes suspect. Mind is, as it were,
simultaneously extended into and penetrated by the world. Indeed, a more
radical form of this view holds that once we bring the interactive landscape
into proper view, it will become clear that the historical baggage carried by
the notion of mind (given its connotations of internality and individualism) is
one source of the problem here, and that the language of ‘mind’ is itself
contestable, as is the language of ‘interaction.’ Understanding and exploring
these different but related viewpoints, as well as identifying and
investigating specific research questions that might decide between them, would
be one important dimension of future work.
4.3 Reconfiguring the Received: From within the interactive paradigm, traditional
research questions concerning the capacities and the phenomena of mind within
their contextual realisations are reconfigured, and new answers come into view.
For example:
a)
The study of the performance arts has undergone an
interactive shift, in the form of a discernible move away from a received, narrowly
representational conceptual framework and towards an ecological approach that
considers a much broader context of production and consumption. This is evidenced,
for example, in new musicology’s interest in ethnomusicology, gender and music,
psychology of music, the history and impact of recording, and the archaeology
of music (both artefacts and sites). At Edinburgh this issue was
discussed explicitly in relation to the way in which we listen to music.
b)
Again in Edinburgh, one of the most recalcitrantly individualistic
and seemingly internal of phenomena – our experience of pain – was given an
interactive treatment which drew on feminist theory, on philosophy in the ‘Continental’
tradition, and on reflective consideration of a number of contemporary
sculptures and paintings, in order to make its case that pain experience has a
robustly public, rather than a purely private, character.
c)
At
both Sheffield and Edinburgh there were discussions of the different ways in
which language may be conceived as a culturally evolving and integral part of
the enabling web of social and technological scaffolding in which we live, learn
and think. Natural language thereby emerges as a kind of transformative
‘cognitive niche’ within which the demands on biological intelligence are quite
radically reconfigured. Significantly, on this view,
language acquisition may depend not on detailed internal ‘innate grammatical
principles’ (the received view in some
highly influential areas of linguistics), but rather on a phased interaction
between general learning abilities and complex linguistic structures that are
in constant use in the world.
4.4 Rethinking History: The interactive paradigm provides us with rich
new ways of understanding historical practices. Here is an illustrative example,
discussed at the Edinburgh workshop: Early modern theatre companies performed a
staggering number of plays (as many as six a week), with relatively infrequent
repetition, very little group rehearsal, each actor playing multiple roles, and
in the face of the extra problem of mounting a new play roughly every
fortnight. Given that early modern actors didn’t possess super-human memory
capacities, how did they do it? This question was posed by one of the invited international
speakers (Evelyn Tribble), and then answered in the interactive key. Conventional
historical studies of the early modern theatre have assumed that cognition
takes place entirely within the individual, and so have typically appealed to the
thought that character specialisation on the part of the actors allowed heavily
routinised dramatic practices. But early modern actors played not only multiple
roles, but also many different character types, so it is difficult to see how such
specialisation and routinisation could have taken place. The interactive perspective
provides an alternative, more compelling solution, in which cognitive
processing is distributed over the individual
actor and the physical and social
environments of the early modern theatre. In brief: The actors were issued with
stripped-down manuscript parts that excised all unnecessary information (e.g. the
other parts, save for scanty cues). These stripped-down parts were used in conjunction
with ‘plots’ – folio-sized sheets of paper containing scene-by-scene accounts
of entrances and exits, necessary properties, casting, and sound and music
cues. These plots functioned as maps of the plays, and they worked by assuming both
the particular three-dimensional physical space (e.g. the door arrangements) of
the stage, and the conventions of movement that were operative in early modern theatre.
Finally, the structures and protocols by which various practices were passed on
to new members of the company (e.g. the provision of bit parts that played
against type) allowed novices to be embedded in the system as a whole while performing
complex roles.[3]
4.5 Material Culture: We construct our social relations through material culture – in part at least,
we are what we eat, wear and build. In this sense material objects become
active components in shaping us as
human beings. Thus, as discussed at the Sheffield workshop, the transition from
the medieval mind to the early modern mind may be seen as a transformation in
our modes of interaction through material culture (e.g. communal food platters
replaced by individual place settings). And, as discussed at the Edinburgh
workshop, Mycenaean vases provide a powerful example of the way in which material
artefacts may constitute a form of environmentally located memory. Discussions
at Edinburgh identified the implications for archaeology and its place on the
intellectual map of mind. Cognitive
archaeology is the study of past ways of
thought as inferred from material remains. Thus a cognitive
archaeologist might ask, ‘What does a Palaeolithic stone tool do for the mind?’.
Conventional ‘in-the-head’ approaches to the study of the mind, by leaving
material culture outside the domain of cognition proper, prevent cognitive
archaeology from making any significant contribution towards an answer to that
question. However, if prehistoric thought, as the interactive mind hypothesis
implies, is not just expressed in the
artefact but often constituted by and
executed through the artefact, then cognitive archaeology becomes an indispensable
component in the study of prehistoric minds.
Of course, material culture is not merely an
issue for archaeology or for history. Contemporary material objects shape
contemporary human beings, as was discussed at Brighton following a
presentation that, from a cultural studies perspective, analysed the way in which
mobile phone communication constructs new lived spaces in which the physically
remote becomes the ecologically near. Relatedly, there was discussion (also at Brighton) of the ways in which we may
understand the architectural spaces that we construct, and with which we then
interact, as playing an intimate role in both the production and the
reproduction of social forms. An intriguing example given here was the Ikea
shopping experience, which (it was argued) works as it does precisely by
violating certain key expectations
that we have regarding the layouts of consumer spaces.
4.6 The Constructed Self: According to one mode of theorising within the
interactive paradigm, human selves are not inner essences, but rather ongoing
narratives constructed through interactive engagements. This point has often
been made by cultural commentators in the context of new technology such as the
Internet. But, as literature and history inform us, the construction of
malleable identities on the Web is merely a recent variation on a fundamental
human process. For example, as discussed at the Sheffield workshop, a striking
investigation of the way in which the person-as-consumer is constructed through
the questions asked by market researchers occurs in a novel by the French
author Perec. And Victorian novelists writing autobiographies of their own
childhoods explored the way in which language itself provides selves with the
medium of construction. In one case, for example, a child’s alternative selves
are realised in two languages that she speaks, one in her middle class home and
one with the “street children” with whom she plays.
4.7 Interaction and Creativity: At both Sheffield and Edinburgh there
were discussions of the manner in which the interactive mind approach may illuminate
human creative activity, perhaps especially (although far from exclusively) in
relation to the ways in which some contemporary artists, dancers and musicians
deploy new technology as an essential component of the creative process itself.
It was at Brighton, however, that this theme was given full rein. The Brighton
workshop was organised in collaboration with (i) Blip, a Brighton-based art-science forum (see
http://www.blip.me.uk), and (ii) the AHRC
funded, Sussex based DrawBots
project, an ongoing attempt to create robots and automata that will evolve
their own unique creative behaviour and signature. Exploiting these collaborations,
the workshop was focussed primarily on the active role that material artefacts
play in human creative activity. This theme was explored from various
perspectives, including those of architecture, cultural studies, fine art, philosophy
and robotics. For example, it was pointed out that when artists draw on the scientific practice of artificial life, they
construct works which are unlike conventional artworks in many ways, in that
they entail interaction in multiple domains – between audience and artwork,
between artist and generative system, and between formal elements or software
agents within the artificial life system itself.
4.8 The Artwork and the Performance as Research:
The product of most research in the interactive paradigm will, of course, be
manifest as academic publications. However, from the interactive perspective,
artworks and performances may count directly as research into the nature of
mind – as explorations of the structure and bounds of our interactivity. Viewed
in this way, the creative and performance arts offer a suite of research tools
that acts as a vital complement to the logocentrism of standard academic
discourse. Saying more about exactly
how such pieces constitute research into the interactive mind would itself be a
meta-theme for further exploration under the interactive umbrella. First raised in Sheffield, the theme of ‘the
artwork and the performance as research’ came to the fore in Brighton, where it
was another targeted topic and also guided the selection of the aforementioned
evening performances. These performances featured leading-edge interactive technologies
such as swarm music and netjacking.[4]
The flavour of the evening is nicely captured by the fact that the event saw
the first ever performance of Alice Eldridge’s ‘Fond Punctions,’ an interactive
audio-visual piece for cello, MAX/MSP (a development environment for music and
multimedia) and processing, in which cybernetic control systems and a simple
graphical environment are used to create real-time re-interpretations of sound
sampled during a live performance. After her performance, Eldridge was approached
by a representative of an independent record company (Loca Records) who had
attended the evening event, to discuss recording and releasing the piece. (An
excerpt from the development phase of ‘Fond Punctions’ can be found at http://www.ecila.org.)
4.9 Educating Minds: The interactive paradigm, with its stress on contextual
embeddedness and fluid self-construction, will have direct consequences for
educational strategies. As was demonstrated by the contributions of a
practising musician, singer and composer present at Sheffield, this
contribution is perhaps at its most immediate within, although it is certainly
not confined to, the development of skills in music and other performance arts.
4.10 Navigating Disciplinary Boundaries: The
interactive mind is a necessarily cross-disciplinary research paradigm, a fact
which signals another meta-theme. At each of the workshops, questions were
raised about how genuinely productive cross-disciplinary collaborations in this
area might be fostered and managed. It was repeatedly pointed out that in some
ways the workshops themselves provided a model of how such a process might
begin, in that they were conducted in a highly constructive atmosphere of
openness and dialogue centred on common themes and concerns, while being
explicitly reflective about the issues that accompany cross-disciplinary
research.
5. Conclusions
5.1 There is no doubt
that the workshops tapped into a rich vein of hitherto obscured cross-disciplinary
interest within the arts and humanities. In bringing together previously
isolated individuals and groups whose ongoing research projects share many
fundamental principles, the series has unearthed the beginnings of an arts and
humanities centred research community, one whose members, despite varied
intellectual backgrounds and discipline-specific nuances in language and
approach, can communicate with each other in a climate of common discovery and
shared goals. The potential for rich cross-fertilization within this community is
thus considerable. Importantly, however, it has not all been back-slapping and
harmony. Challenging debates and disagreements, within and around the idea of
the interactive mind, have already been identified and partially explored.
5.2 The series of workshops
has, during this year, had a discernible impact on the UK arts and humanities
community, in at least the sense that it has forged profitable connections
between previously isolated groups and individuals who, it turns out, have
strongly overlapping intellectual commitments and research agendas. There is
little doubt that some of these associations will continue and will generate
collaborative research projects. In addition, the national co-ordinator has amassed
a still-expanding list of individuals who became aware of the workshop series,
and who wish to be kept informed about any related future developments in the
area, even though they could not attend any of the events organised so far. The
challenge now is to consolidate and to build on this success. Producing a
genuine structuring effect on arts and humanities research in the UK will
require more and significant targeted investment, in one form or another.
Otherwise there is a real risk that many of the tangible benefits of the workshop
series will dissipate under the dual cosh of discipline-specific expectations
and local institutional responsibilities.
Mike Wheeler (Department
of Philosophy, University of Stirling, National Coordinator for the AHRC
Interactive Mind workshop series), with assistance from various members of the
core group, plus Jon Bird, Lambros Malafouris, and Evelyn Tribble. October 2005.
Appendix: The Programmes
1. Sheffield
Venue:
ICOSS (Informatics Collaboratory for the Social Sciences)
Friday
April 8
13.00
– 14.00 Buffet lunch
14.00
– 14.15 Welcome and introduction: Eric Clarke (Music, Sheffield)
14.15
– 15.45:
Chris Gosden (Archaeology, Oxford): ‘The Sociable Object’
Sally
Shuttleworth (English Literature, Sheffield): ‘First Impressions:
Mind, Language and Childhood in Late-C19th Literature and Science’
Michael
Siegal (Psychology, Sheffield): ‘Conceptual Change in Children’
15.45
– 16.15 Tea and coffee
16.15
– 17.45:
Mark
Greengrass (History, Sheffield): ‘Governing Passions: an
Early-Modern Perspective’
Mike Wheeler (Philosophy,
Stirling): ‘Spreading the Word: Material Symbols and the Extended Mind’
Tim Ingold
(Anthropology, Aberdeen): ‘Evolution and the Ecology of Mind’
17.45
– 18.30 General discussion: themes from the day.
19.30
Dinner.
Saturday
April 9
9.30
– 11.00:
Gerard Duveen
(Social Psychology, Cambridge): ‘Symbolic Resources in Development’
Jim Hurford (Linguistics,
Edinburgh): ‘Three Evolutionary Levels of ‘Concepts’ – the Last Two Influenced
by Interaction’
David Walker (French,
Sheffield): ‘Writing the Mind of the Shopper’.
11.00
– 11.30 Tea and coffee
11.30
– 13.00 General discussion: conceptions of ‘The Interactive Mind’, and how it
might be studied/theorised/explored. Future directions/plans.
13.00
Buffet lunch and close.
2. Edinburgh
Venue:
Abden House, Pollock Halls, University of Edinburgh
Friday June 10
9.15-9.45:
Arrival and Registration
9.45-10.00:
Welcome Mike Wheeler (Philosophy, Stirling)
10.00-11.00:
Eric Clarke (Music, Sheffield) ‘Music – Mind – Environment: An Ecological
Perspective’
11.00-11.30:
Tea and Coffee
11.30-12.30:
Evelyn Tribble (English, Otago) ‘“To Ease the Burden of the Brain”: Distributed
Cognition in Early Modern England’
12.30-13.30:
Lunch
13.30-14.30:
Mark Rowlands (Philosophy, Hertfordshire) ‘Body Language: Representation in
Action’
14.30-15.30:
Rachel Jones (Philosophy, Dundee) ‘The Other Within: Questioning the Privacy of
Pain’
15.30-16.00:
Tea and Coffee
16.00-17.00:
Carl Knappett (Archaeology, Exeter) ‘Scaffolding: between Agents and Artefacts
in Archaeology’
17.00-18.00:
Lambros Malafouris (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge)
‘Hylonoetics: Material Engagement and the Archaeology of Extended Cognition’
19.30
Dinner
Saturday June 11
9.00-10.00:
Andrew Smith (Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, Linguistics,
Edinburgh) ‘Learning, Culture and Adaptation: how Language Evolves in
Interacting Minds’
10.00-11.00:
Stephen Cowley (Psychology, Hertfordshire) ‘Language: a Distributed View’
11.00-11.30:
Tea and Coffee
11.30-12.30:
Mike Wheeler (Philosophy, Stirling) ‘Interactive Minds, Extended Minds, and
Vanishing Minds, or How to Avoid Abandoning Oneself to the Flux’
12.30-13.30:
Lunch
13.30-14.30:
Marlon Barrios Solano (Independent dance and new media artist/scholar, USA)
‘Post-Humanist Performance: Intersecting Dance Improvisation, Real-time Multimedia
Environments and Embodied/Embedded
Cognition’
14.30-15.30:
Irene McAra-McWilliam (Royal College of Art) ‘Ambient Intelligence and the
Technological Imaginary’
15.30-16.00:
Tea and Coffee
16.00-17.00:
Matthew Chalmers (Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, Glasgow) ‘Interaction
with and through Computers’
17.00:
Close
NB: Andy Clark (Philosophy,
Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh), and Simon Kirby (Language
Evolution and Computation Research Unit, Linguistics, Edinburgh) were due to speak at this workshop.
Unfortunately both were forced to withdraw at the last minute – Andy Clark due
an illness in his family and Simon Kirby due to becoming a father. Their slots
were filled by Andrew Smith and Mike
Wheeler.
3. Brighton
Venue:
Sussex Arts Club, Brighton
Co-organised with Blip (a
Brighton-based art-science forum), and the AHRC-funded DrawBots Project
Tuesday July
19
13.00-13.30:
Registration
13.30-13.45:
Mike Wheeler (Philosophy, Stirling) Welcome and overview
13.45-14.45:
Alan Penn (Architecture, UCL) ‘The View from the Bed’
14.45-15.45:
Charlie Gere (Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster) ‘Decisions,
Decisions, Decisions’
15.45-16.15:
Tea and coffee
16.15-17.15:
Tim Blackwell (Computer Science, Goldsmiths) ‘Algorithms and Termites’
18.00-19.30:
Dinner
20.00-23.00: An evening
of talks, discussions, performances and films around the idea of the
interactive mind, open to the general public
20.00-21.00:
Mitchell Whitelaw (Media and Multi-Media, Canberra) ‘Dynamic Artefacts:
Interaction and A-Life Art’ (Talk)
21.15-21.30:
Alice Eldridge (Artificial Life and Creative Systems, Sussex) ‘Fond Punctions’,
Interactive AV piece for cello, MAX/MSP and processing (Performance)
21.40-22.00:
Tim Blackwell (Computer Science, Goldsmiths) ‘Swarm Techtiles: A Sound You Can
Touch’, an Exploration of Visual and Sonic Texture (Performance)
22.10-22.30:
Stuart Smith (Laptop Jams) Netjacking performance
22.30-23.00:
Phillip Minns aka Madonna over Yorkshire. Remix of the evening’s sound events
with sound tracks old and new (Performance)
Throughout
the evening:
Mette
Ramsgard Thomsen (Architecture, UCL). Film of and discussion about ‘The
Changing Room’, an interactive performance merging physical and digital
experiences.
Alex
Zivanovic (Mechanical Engineering, Imperial). Film of and discussion about
Edward Ihnatowicz’ Senster, one of the first examples of robot-involving interactive
art.
Stuart
Smith and Lars Schuy (Laptop Jams). ‘Reel Speak’ (Interactive Installation).
Wednesday July
20
9.30-10.30: Paul Brown (Artist and Writer specialising in Art and
Technology; Visiting
Fellow at the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck,
London) ‘Creating Mind’
10.30-11.30: Daro Montag (Visual Arts, University College
Falmouth) ‘Art is a Process – Minding is a Verb’
11.30-12.00: Tea and coffee
12.00-13.00: Richard Menary (Philosophy, Hertfordshire) ‘The Art
of Memory and Art as Memory’
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14.00-15.00: Caroline Bassett (Media and Film, Sussex) ‘Species of
Spaces’
15.00-16.00: Owen Holland (Computer Science, Essex) ‘Mind as Simulated
Interaction’
16.00: Close
[1] This
represents a divergence from the pattern envisaged in the national
co-ordinator’s original proposal. The initial expectation was that the Brighton
workshop, like the Edinburgh one, would be a smaller, invitation-only event,
but by the time the Brighton workshop was taking shape, so much interest had
been generated by the first two workshops and the surrounding publicity that it
would have been seriously counter-productive to have restricted participation.
[2] One theme identified at
the original focus group meeting with which the workshops did not
systematically engage, but which is clearly within the remit of the paradigm,
concerns the ethical, social and political issues surrounding the ever-growing dependence of intelligent human activity
on information and computer technologies (including within educational
institutions). This is clearly an important area that could be developed in the
future.
[3] Tribble
also presented an interactive mind analysis of a key aspect of the transition
from Catholic worship to Protestant worship in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century. In this transition, the complex ritualism of the Catholic
Mass was replaced by a focus on the sermon, and, crucially, a demand that the parishioner
be able to accurately recall the sermon on the basis of a single hearing. As in
the case of the mnemonic demands placed on early modern actors, this memory
task looks to be impossibly difficult, if one poses it in a conventional,
individualistic way. However, what Protestant religion introduced was an entire
interactive system in which the work of memory was, in various ways,
distributed over the preacher, the parishioner, the book, and the physical
environment of the church.
[4] Swarm music is produced
by a computer program that generates music by modelling how particles move in
swarms and flocks. As the particles move through a virtual three dimensional
music space, they generate different pitches, volumes, sound textures and
pulses. In the performance at Brighton, the autonomous
swarm music algorithm collaborated actively with a human saxophonist in a
real-time improvisation. Netjacking is an improvisation of images and sound
using projected found images and live global talk-radio accessed in real
time from the Internet.