Non-human Agents Research Articles

Folded space of machine listening

The paper investigates new machine listening technologies through a comparison of phenomenological and empirical/media-archeological approaches. While phenomenology associates listening with subjectivity, empiricism takes into account the technical operations involved with listening processes in both human and non-human apparatuses. Based on this theoretical framework, the paper undertakes a media-archeological investigation of two algorithms employed in copyright detection: “acoustic fi ngerprinting” and “audio watermarking”. In the technical operations of sound recognition algorithms, empirical analysis suggests the coexistence of a multiplicity of spatialities: from the “sound event”, which occurs in three-dimensional physical space, to its mathematical representation in vector space, and to the one-dimensional informational space of data processing and machine-to-machine communication. Recalling Deleuze’s defi nition of “the fold”, we defi ne these coexistent spatial dimensions in techno-culturally mediated sound as “the folded space” of machine listening. We go on to argue that the issue of space in machine listening consists of the virtually infi nite variability of the sound event being subjected to automatic recognition. The diffi culty lies in conciliating the theoretically enduring information transmitted by sound with the contingent manifestation of sound affected by space. To make machines able to deal with the site-specifi city of sound, recognition algorithms need to reconstruct the three-dimensional space on a signal processing level, in a sort of reverse-engineering of the sound phenomenon that recalls the concept of “implicit sonicity” defi ned by Wolfgang Ernst. While the metaphors and social representations adopted to describe machine listening are often anthropomorphic – and the very term “listening”, when referring to numerical operations, can be seen as a metaphor in itself – we argue that both human listening and machine listening are co-defi ned in a socio-technical network, in which the listening space no longer coincides with the position of the listening subject, but is negotiated between human and nonhuman agencies.

The balancing act of social enterprise: An IT emergence perspective

The significance of IT in the context of non-digital social enterprises (SEs) and its influence on the viability of such SEs have been less studied themes in information systems research. In the era of ubiquitous IT, SEs have increasing pressures to cope with the ever-dynamic technological domain while balancing their dual objectives. Data from a single revelatory case of Jaipur Rugs (JR), an SE situated in a developing country context (India), is used to fathom the peculiarities of the SE context with a focus on the sociomaterial phenomena of IT emergence. Using the three fundamental notions of sociomateriality theory (relationality, performativity, and practice) this interpretive study understands the mechanisms underlying the SE’s attempt to balance its financial and social sustainability objectives. Through the innovative use of IT, the SE establishes and maintains shared value, yielding stability and efficiency to the business (financial viability) while simultaneously ensuring scalability and effectiveness of their social impact. This study strengthens the perspective of IT as an emergent phenomenon situated in sociomaterial practices and fills a gap in organizational literature by examining such phenomenon in the rich context of SEs where achieving the balance between dual goals is increasingly dependent on non-human (IT) agents.

Blame Attribution Asymmetry in Human-Automation Cooperation.

Human-automation cooperation has become ubiquitous. In this concept, automation refers to autonomous machines, robots, artificial intelligence, and other autonomous nonhuman agents. A human driver will share control of semiautonomous vehicles (semi-AVs) with an automated system and thus share responsibility for crashes caused by semi-AVs. Research has not clarified whether and why people would attribute different levels of blame and responsibility to automation (and its creators) and its human counterpart when each causes an equivalent crash. We conducted four experiments in two studies (total N = 1,045) to measure different responses (e.g., severity and acceptability judgment, blame and responsibility attribution, compensation judgment) to hypothetical crashes that are caused by the human or the automation in semi-AVs. The results provided previously unidentified evidence of a bias, which we called the "blame attribution asymmetry," a tendency that people will judge the automation-caused crash more harshly, ascribe more blame and responsibility to automation and its creators, and think the victim in this crash should be compensated more. This asymmetry arises in part because of the higher negative affect triggered by the automation-caused crash. This bias has a direct policy implication: a policy allowing "not-safe enough" semi-AVs on roads could backfire, because these AVs will lead to many traffic crashes, which might in turn produce greater psychological costs and deter more people from adopting them. Other theoretical and policy implications of our findings were also discussed.

Power matters: Posthuman entanglements in a social solidarity clinic

This paper develops a materialist and performative conception of power, proposing a theoretical framework that bridges Barad’s intra-active agential ontology and Foucault’s microphysics of power. The article uses empirical data collected from a social clinic in Greece where the traditional apparatus of the clinic is contested and experimentally reconfigured. We focus on three overlapping themes and reflect on how power relations materialize themselves through everyday practices and multiple entanglements between human and non-human agents. We argue that these entanglements constitute the dynamic matter of power: their performative reiteration determines how power matters. By showing how power materially exceeds the manifest intentions of human agents, our case study aims to contribute to an idea of alternative organising that accounts for the materiality of mundane posthuman entanglements within an antagonistic understanding of power.

Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change ed. by Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett M. Bennett

Reviewed by: Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change ed. by Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett M. Bennett Samuel Dolbee Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change. Edited by ulrike Kirchberger and brett m. bennett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 278 pp. ISBN 978-1-4696-2. $29.95 (paper). In the 1880s, the Swiss biologist Johann Bütikoffer went to Liberia as part of a Dutch-funded expedition in search of the pygmy hippopotamus. Unable to find the animal, Bütikoffer sought the help of local people, and showed them a drawing of a "brownish-reddish" creature (p. 151). They told him that they had never seen such a thing. The hippo they were familiar with was "black and a bit greenish." It turned out that the drawing had not been based on observation of the creature in West Africa, but rather had been completed based on the skins of hippos taken from Africa to Europe, where the material remains of the animal had changed in color over time. Hence the confusion, adeptly chronicled by historian Stephanie Zehnle in Environments of Empire, a volume edited by Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett M. Bennett based on a workshop held at the University of Kassel in 2015. As demonstrated by the "brownish-reddish" pygmy hippo—an image of which graces the book's cover—imperial understanding and control of environments was never complete or clear, even if always consequential. And the authoritative version of science that emerged from these violent encounters often relied on the knowledge and labor of local people whose names were largely excised from history. Zehnle's account and the volume's others are histories of ecology and imperialism. But they are distinct from Alfred Crosby's 1986 [End Page 722] Ecological Imperialism, which Ulrike Kirchberger identifies as a field-defining book in the volume's introduction. In Kirchberger's view, the volume's main contribution is a "wider comparative and transnational" scope than that offered by Crosby and the wave of work that followed (p. 1). The volume also poses different methodological approaches, primarily having to do with the question of nonhuman agency. In some chapters, we see imperial challenge (if not necessarily failure), with Alexander van Wickeren showing how Cuban tobacco did not acclimatize to France, Samuel Eleazer Wendt tracing how plant diseases afflicted cotton and rubber plantations in German Togo and Cameroon, and Idir Ouahes revealing how locusts and bovine plague undermined agrarian designs in French Syria and Lebanon. In other chapters, we see how imperial institutions gathered and recirculated knowledge about the environment through case studies by Semih Çelik on the Natural History Museum in Istanbul, Florian Wagner on the world-famous Buitenzorg experimental farm in Dutch Java, and Carey McCormack on the collecting practices of Joseph Hooker in British India. And still other chapters squarely foreground nonhuman agency. Zehnle, Jodi Frawley, and Nicole Y. Chalmer suggest how the aforementioned pygmy hippo as well as oysters and feral horses respectively all shaped and were shaped by imperialism. The sum is an image of empire at once more constrained and more intentional than what emerges from Crosby's famous work. Most significantly, the combined chapters—clustered, as they are, between 1870 and 1939—offer insight into the experts who mobilized knowledge of the environment to advance empire. Political economy guided these efforts, which tellingly involved the struggle against the coffee berry borer, as well as the smuggling of cinchona from South America to Java for the purpose of developing quinine and fighting malaria. And while the sources reveal more of imperial power structures than, say, peasants' experiences of these structures, a number of chapters nevertheless make concerted efforts to read against the grain. Altogether, the chapters shed light not only on ecologies and imperialism but also the role of knowledge in these endeavors. The volume's epilogue moves in a historiographical direction, as Brett M. Bennett surveys historians' suspicion and scientists' embrace of Ecological Imperialism. In response, Bennett champions an interdisciplinary synthesis by connecting Crosby's claims with the scientific field of "invasion ecology." The science, Bennett argues, largely confirms the vision of Crosby, in which plants and animals spread...

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 by Sugata Ray

Reviewed by: Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 by Sugata Ray Melanie Barbato Sugata Ray. 2019, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pp. 264. $70.00. This book is highly recommended for scholars, practitioners, and artists with an interest in the interplay of aesthetics and the environment, in material culture and non-human agency, and in South Asian art and religion. From the term "climate change" in the title, some readers may expect the book to present responses to the current environmental crisis. This is, however, not the case. The subtitle clarifies that the book focuses on a historical climatic change, the period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries that is known as "the little ice age." Throughout the book, Ray uses terms like "climate upheaval" rather than "climate change," probably in part because this little ice age was a temporary crisis rather than the onset of a long-term climatic trend. Nevertheless, the book speaks to the current era of climate change because at its heart lie the timely issues of the environmental elements' agency and their interconnectedness with human art and religion, especially in times of crisis and rapid transformation. The impact of the little ice age on European art is well documented. Pieter Bruegel's famous winter scenes appear idyllic only at first sight. A closer look reveals them as products of a time in which people tried to come to terms with the terrible beauty of unprecedentedly harsh winters, both artistically and religiously. Ray's book offers a much needed non-Western perspective on this era of climatic catastrophe. The drop in temperature witnessed in the Alpine areas also affected the sea surface temperature, which led to a disruption of the El Niño events and thus also to droughts and famine in many parts of the world. Ray shows that the artistic and religious responses to these phenomena in the East were just as profound as in European art, but very different. He focuses on Braj, an region of northern India known for its rich devotional tradition, particularly in veneration of the Hindu deity Vishnu. Vishnu is believed to have appeared in different incarnations, and the [End Page 222] most popular of these is Krishna, a playful and handsome young man who spends his days in amorous play with the female cowherds, particularly Radha. In Braj, countless natural sites, such as rock formations or groves, are venerated as places where certain events of Krishna's life took place. Ray shows how this superposition of natural and spiritual landscapes coalesced to form an organically interrelated sacred ecosystem. The main part of the book is structured around four environmental elements: water, land, forest, and ether. The chapter on water focuses on the river Yamuna, which is considered a site of spiritual purification. Ray discusses a sixteenth-century watercolor of Krishna bathing playfully in the flowing stream. In this image, which also appears on the book's cover, much attention has been paid to depicting the varied dynamics of the water through intricate patterns of fine white lines on the deep blue background. Ray argues that this innovative artistic representation could be linked to new ways of seeing water in an age of droughts and water scarcity. However, he does not want this interconnection to be understood in a deterministic or reductionist way. Rather, hydroaesthetics should be considered a "relational field" that brings together the "political, social, theological and aesthetic imperatives of seeing water" (p.47). A mineral-rich sandstone ridge serves as the focal point of the second thematic part. This ridge, called Govardhan, is venerated as Krishna's own form embodied in stone. It is said that Govardhan started bleeding when workers attempted to remove a stone, and even the reddish dust of Govardhan is experienced by worshippers as a physical manifestation of the divine. Ray argues that during the climatic catastrophes in the epoch under discussion, the people of Braj experienced land not merely as an object for human cultivation but as a life form with its own agency, often...

The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England by Joshua Calhoun

Reviewed by: The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England by Joshua Calhoun Maral Attar-Zadeh Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 288 pp., 30 ills. As he meditates on an old Bible, the narrator of Henry Vaughan's "The Book" (1655) has strange and beautiful visions: he imagines the lives of the plants, animals, and humans who have contributed to the material making up the book––the boards and the sheepskin, the rags and linen that were recycled into paper for its pages––and then imagines these same creatures resurrected in the afterlife, trees and sheep restored alongside with men. These visions reveal the old book to be not just a textual object but also an ecological meeting place, embedded in natural cycles of creation and corruption. This is a manner of looking and reading, a way of telling "natural" stories about the "cultural" artifact of the book, which Joshua Calhoun has taken up in his new book, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. With early modern handmade paper as his "marvelous but flawed protagonist" (8), Calhoun tells a story about bibliographic innovation, production, use, and decay in which human and nonhuman agency are always entangled, where the materiality of texts does not recede in the process of literary analysis but rather opens up new poetic and interpretative possibilities. Two main lines of argument emerge from this narrative: first, that the historical readers of Renaissance books––including Shakespeare, Donne, and the translators of the King James Bible––had a fuller understanding of the natural origins of their books and of bookmaking practices, and developed a poetics of paper that was rooted in, and referred back to, the very material on which it was written; and second, that recovering the aesthetics of paper production, quality, and decay draws from and brings into dialogue contemporary debates in the fields of book history and ecocriticism, constituting an "ecology of texts"—what Calhoun calls "a necessary and timely extension" of D. F. Mackenzie's sociology of texts (19). The book is organized into two parts: "Legible Ecologies" and "Indistinct Ecologies." In the first chapter, Calhoun sketches out a history of paper with a special emphasis on material scarcity, the movement of ideas and resources, and the human and ecological cost of the push for increasingly cheaper means of paper production. Chapter 2 is centered on "The Book," exploring Vaughan's "palimpsestic reading strategy," which allowed him to attend to the traces of plant, animal, and human life in a book––visible on the surface of the page as pieces of unprocessed linen or embedded hair, and in its text as metaphors with "vegetable origins" (80). The fascinating third chapter considers blots in early modern books––and one in particular, in a Folger Library copy of 2 Henry IV––as "accidentals": not just accidents but drawing the eye and supplementing the meaning of the text, changing the color and timbre of the reading as a musical [End Page 227] accidental would. The second part of the chapter dwells on the language of blotting and erasure in the King James Bible, exploring how the coexistence of parchment (which could be razed) and paper (which had to be blotted) in this period contributed to the formation of two competing aesthetics of error and correction, two theological models for the forgiveness of sins. Chapter 4, "Sizing Matters," focuses on animal sizing, a mostly invisible and often overlooked part of early modern bookmaking. As with the previous case studies, the chapter brings the poetic tropes referring to this aspect of the book's ecological makeup together with a material history of sizing practices. From this ecopoetic investigation, Calhoun draws a surprising and compelling conclusion about the effect of sizing on historical book use and rates of book survival—as opposed to the intuitive and widely accepted view that books that were most heavily used and annotated would be most vulnerable to decay and less likely to survive, he suggests that the presence and quality of...

How Digital Technologies Modify The Work Characteristics: A Preliminary Study.

New technologies with unprecedented agentic capabilities (i.e., action selection, protocol development) are now introduced in organizations such as Big Data, 3D printing or artificial intelligence. Because they are endowed with novel capabilities that might compete with human agency, they might disrupt the way employees work. Based on the work design model, this study aims to examine their introduction in the daily work activities and the consequent perceptions of the work characteristics. Building on Murray's et al. (2020) proposal, we offer a classification of the digital technologies to conceptualize their relationship with the work characteristics. To explore the changes induced by two digital technologies (i.e., drones, robotic automation process), we interviewed 3 types of employees (i.e., experts, managers, users) from an organization which has started a digitalization process and we conducted a thematic analysis. Our analysis revealed three main themes that are discussed: A technological theme (arresting, assisting), a work characteristic theme and a theme about the human-technology relationship (agentic, non-agentic). Results showed that employee autonomy has not been reduced when digital technologies executed repetitive and unmotivated tasks and that jobs in the digital work context may be marked by a high level of knowledge characteristics. Moreover, technologies with agentic capabilities may be perceived as a non-human agent. Theoretical contributions for the work design model are then examined.

Reconsidering domestication from a process archaeology perspective

ABSTRACT Process philosophy offers a metaphysical foundation for domestication studies. This grounding is especially important given the European colonialist origin of ‘domestication’ as a term and 19th century cultural project. We explore the potential of process archaeology for deep-time investigation of domestication relationships, drawing attention to the variable pace of domestication as an ongoing process within and across taxa; the nature of domestication ‘syndromes’ and ‘pathways’ as general hypotheses about process; the importance of cooperation as well as competition among humans and other organisms; the significance of non-human agency; and the ubiquity of hybrid communities that resist the simple wild/domestic dichotomy.

A Seat At The Table

Abstract Aotearoa New Zealand acknowledges mātauranga Māori in the two Acts and one Memorandum of Understanding recognising the ‘personhood’ status of three geographical regions—Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga. They blend the legal fiction of corporate personhood with the already always understanding of human-nonhuman kinship and entanglement of M!ori philosophy, Māori knowledge and wisdom, and Māori epistemology. Through kaitiaki (trustees) these three entities have volition in their ongoing maintenance, development negotiations, and ‘land-use’, and ‘the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’. These attributes suggest something more than mere volition in self-management and protection: they suggest agency. This article explores the implications of nonhuman agency as potential for political voice. As representatives of entanglement for all being—animal (including human), vegetable and elemental—and as a matter of justice they are, perhaps, obliged to participate in democracy and the nation is, perhaps, obliged to give them a ‘seat at the table’. As political agents with equal status to human and corporate persons Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga might unsettle settler politics and challenge the imbalances of the Anthropocene.

Romanticism and Speculative Realism ed. by Anne C. McCarthy and Chris Washington

Reviewed by: Romanticism and Speculative Realism ed. by Anne C. McCarthy and Chris Washington Joshua David Gonsalves (bio) Anne C. McCarthy and Chris Washington, eds. Romanticism and Speculative Realism. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 290. $125 hardcover. Romanticism and Speculative Realism reconceptualizes Romanticism via recent innovations in philosophy: renovated ontologies, new materialisms, speculations on relations between (non)humans, ecology, and social infrastructures. The results take the form of practical criticism, as the collection subjects Romanticist preconceptions of imagination, nature, and language to advances in theoretical thinking. It is one more welcome attempt to keep literary criticism on the cutting edge of things. Essays in the collection cover a wide range of subjects, including readings of familiar canonical Romantic writers, such as Blake (Allison Dushane), Byron (Aaron Ottinger), Keats (Greg Ellermann), Scott (Evan Gottlieb), and Wordsworth (Joel Faflak); some concern less usual suspects, such as John Clare (David Collings), Rousseau (Chris Washington), Poe (Graham Harman), and Equiano (Alexander Dick); other chapters take on some broader categories of Romantic-period writing such as Nature (Mary Jacobus), The Spirit of the Age (Michele Speitz), Feminisms (Kate Singer), and Cookery Books (Brian Rejack). As the introduction announces, the volume attempts to demonstrate “the necessity of romanticism for understanding the world revealed by speculative realism” (1). A bit of context, however, before approaching this encounter between philosophy and literary studies, since there is always a risk that the philosophy becomes diluted as it comes into contact with literary reading practices. This happened with deconstruction, in which Paul de Man’s ruthless close reading found a receptive soil in New Criticism-enriched literature departments in contradistinction to the English-language reductions imposed on a very different Derridean deconstruction. Similar reductions are currently [End Page 240] happening to “Speculative Realism,” as is exemplified by its identification with Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO) and New Materialism. It will be helpful then to distinguish Speculative Realism (associated with Meillassoux, Brassier, and, to a lesser extent, Iain Hamilton Grant), OOO (associated with Graham Harman)—which believes it can access Kant’s things-in-themselves via “allusion,” or a figurative language replete with anecdotal objects (220)—, and the misnamed New Materialism, which insists, alongside Latour, on the non-human agency of objects. One succinct way of addressing these distinctions would be to suggest that what OOO and New Materialism leave out, unlike the speculative realism of Meillassoux and Brassier, is historical materialism. Similarly, the influence of Badiou, a staunch believer in History (with a capital H, as in Hegel, Marx, and other dialectical thinkers who invest in history rather than the object in order to escape Kant), is powerfully felt in Meillassoux and Brassier’s writings, but falls by the wayside in OOO and New Materialism. How, then, can the fate of these theoretical-historical contexts in Romanticism and Speculative Realism help us evaluate the way it deals with these differences? The term “Speculative Realism” offers a clue, since Harman, who contributes an essay to this volume, continues to use it despite Brassier and Meillassoux insisting that he stop associating his project with theirs. Both of these writers, who resist the exploitation of the term, take Badiou seriously (one being his student, the other his translator-explicator), in part because historical materialism is central to their versions of Speculative Realism. Two contributors to this volume, Faflak and Washington, register the contextual importance of historical materialism by engaging our contemporary capitalist horizon (59, 141) even as Faflak brackets a historicism-cum-materialism in favor of what this volume requires—close reading—, a bracketing of philosophy that Harman likewise enacts via his reading of Poe’s “The Black Cat.” The point is that the philosophical horizon that Brassier-Meillassoux-Badiou occupy is ultimately foreign to Harman, who also writes literary criticism per se, while Meillassoux’s book on Mallarmé concerns mathematical number, which is both liberatory and capitalism-as-usual in Badiou. Support for the difference between Speculative Realism of the Brassier-Meillassoux variety and OOO can be found in Nathan Brown’s succinct demolition of Harman, a critique that has garnered much commentary for allegedly being uncollegial, yet Peter Wolfendale’s book has demonstrated the same with relentless philosophical rigor (see Brown, “The Nadir...

Mina Loy's Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti

 Reviews possession of language. How does one represent the non-human in narrative, and what debates must ensue about the nature and limits of anthropocentrism? Jon Hegglund’s contribution makes claims for the power of narrative in highlighting non-human agency (in horror literature or sci-fi). Mention is also made in the Introduction of children’s fiction, which is so oen about animals, though children’s literature is sadly absent from the main body of essays. () Second is the issue of narrative ethics, the way narratives position or assume their agents and recipients in culturally specific ways, making narratology engage issues of cultural politics beyond the kinds of exclusively technical or formal analysis and classification with which it is still oen identified. () A third key direction for narratology engaged here is a turn towards cognitive science, as in Matthew M. Low’s exploratory paper on how its cognitive modelling through narratives can work as a resource for the actual restoration of the American prairie. e edited collection of essays is a staple form of research publication in the humanities. However, it is probably rare for someone other than a reviewer to read a collection from cover to cover. I would also wager that if a survey were done of citations from this kind of critical anthology, the introduction would oen rank among the most utilized of its essays. is will probably be the case with James and Morel’s fine ‘Introduction: Notes toward New Econarratologies’, which performs well the overall revisionist work ascribed to the whole collection. So many ecocritical essays, including several here, take the limited form of proselytizing for a contemporary text likely to be unknown to a reader. As James and Morel showcase, an introduction has the advantage of needing to be succinct and of being written last, as a summary overview, with less of the air of being a critic’s personal performance. D U T C Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism. By L S. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. . x+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is book joins a number of recent monographs that reflect a burgeoning academic interest in the work of long-neglected but quintessential modernist Mina Loy, notably Tara Prescott’s Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ) and Sarah Hayden’s Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ). Laura Scuriatti makes an original contribution to the field by exploring some of the less familiar material reprinted in Mina Loy: Stories and Essays, ed. by Sara Crangle (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, ): work such as the ‘Mi & Lo’ fragments, and the essays ‘History of Religion and Eros’ and ‘e Library of the Sphinx’, the latter an imagined dialogue with Havelock Ellis that contains a characteristically piquant Loy observation: ‘the whole of our psychological literature written by men might be lumped together as the unwitting analysis of the unsatisfied woman’ (p. ). Scuriatti also delves into the archive of unpublished material held at Yale, MLR, .,   commenting, for example, on the ‘Geronimo’ fragment, a portrayal of Giovanni Papini intended for the unfinished prose work ‘Esau Penfold’, and (more extensively ) on ‘Goy Israels’, a prose account of the family dysfunctions that Loy also explored in her long poem ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’. Rather than being consigned to the ‘marginal corner of modernist scholarship, reserved for those eccentric authors (mostly women) who did not fit the criteria of high modernism’, Scuriatti suggests that Loy should be seen as projecting a ‘critical gaze into the very heart of the modernist and avant-garde canon’ (p. ). She identifies Loy’s work as being informed by a tension between, on the one hand, the early modernist conception of ‘the artwork as a product of genius’ with its creator ‘endowed with a quasi-divine power of insight into reality’ and, on the other, a more ‘critical modernist conception, which destabilizes the categories of artwork, artist, and art as part of a broader critique of normative notions of gender, identity, and subjectivity’ (ibid.). Chapters are devoted to Loy’s interaction with radical Italian writing before the First World War, as influenced by Otto Weininger...

Texting with Humanlike Conversational Agents: Designing for Anthropomorphism

Conversational agents (CAs) are natural language user interfaces that emulate human-to-human communication. Because of this emulation, research on CAs is inseparably linked to questions about anthropomorphism—the attribution of human qualities, including consciousness, intentions, and emotions, to nonhuman agents. Past research has demonstrated that anthropomorphism affects human perception and behavior in human-computer interactions by, for example, increasing trust and connectedness or stimulating social response behaviors. Based on the psychological theory of anthropomorphism and related research on computer interface design, we develop a theoretical framework for designing anthropomorphic CAs. We identify three groups of factors that stimulate anthropomorphism: technology design-related factors, task-related factors, and individual factors. Our findings from an online experiment support the derived framework but also reveal novel yet counterintuitive insights. In particular, we demonstrate that not all combinations of anthropomorphic technology design cues increase perceived anthropomorphism. For example, we find that using only nonverbal cues harms anthropomorphism; however, this effect becomes positive when nonverbal cues are complemented with verbal or human identity cues. We also find that CAs’ disposition to complete computerlike versus humanlike tasks and individuals’ disposition to anthropomorphize greatly affect perceived anthropomorphism. This work advances our understanding of anthropomorphism and contextualizes the theory of anthropomorphism within the IS discipline. We advise on the directions that research and practice should take to find the sweet spot for anthropomorphic CA design.

Challenges of Cross-Border Cooperation: The Initiative of Trilateral Goričko–Raab–Őrség Nature Park

The trajectories of social actions comprising nature conservation and regional economic development in the Slovenian-Austrian-Hungarian tri-border area discussed in this paper are closely linked to the landscape of the Slovenian-Austrian-Hungarian border. Processual understanding bounds landscape to human activities and other non-human agents, all of whom constitute the landscape-in-the-making. The Őrség National Park and Goričko Landscape Park, as designated nature reserves, are subject to human influences through their protection and, as intrinsically objects of human agency, are rich sites of social production and interaction. The cross-border initiative of the Trilateral Goričko–Raab–Őrség Nature Park is analyzed through the politics of European integration and territorial cooperation in the peripheral regions and their financial programs. Through field research and interviews with social actors, the complexity of the obstacles that hinder the functioning and effective management of the actions of the proposed Trilateral Nature Park initiative and the ambivalent attitude of the inhabitants towards the actions of the three parks is observed.

The Dark Pastoral: Material Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

The “dark pastoral” unites the Anthropocene’s strangely sunny celebration of its fossil-fueled agriculture and technology generally with the retro-nostalgic, “pastoral” dreams of resplendent greenery, which is all too often complicit in the wealth of global industrial capitalism and colonial resource acquisition dictating specific land uses. With the dark pastoral, I pay particular attention to “anthropocenic” materialities and human and non-human agencies in order to frame, analyze, and even, perhaps, re-shape our ecological thought(s) and actions. The dark pastoral is thus an ecocritical trope adapted to the “new nature” of climate change, the troublingly catastrophecentered scenarios so popular in the fossil-fueled era of the Anthropocene, and the ongoing centrality of reverently pastoral impulses in environmentalism. By studying together the jarring contrasts of, on the one hand, total catastrophic rubble that may unintentionally reveal naive visions of cultural power in popular post-apocalyptic texts and films and, on the other hand, the traditional (and poignant) ideals of “nature” as a former (deemed lost) blue-green place of harmony that often purposefully dissemble power structures behind utopian settings, the dark pastoral is well armed with diverse strategies for exposing the dynamics of power and agency in relation to material nature-culture.

Blowing specific words: verbal charms as material suspended events

Abstract This article undermines the actuality of a strict boundary between language and materiality by presenting verbal charms (puheged, vajhed/pakitas in Vepsian) among Veps, an Indigenous minority group of Northwest Russia. Vepsian verbal charms are ritualized ways of speaking that are customarily used to prompt a change in both human beings and environments in very tangible ways. When observing how they are conceived, distributed, and performed among Veps, the rigid separation between “material” and “immaterial” realms begins to be felt as an artificial construction, since Veps understand that in the act of “blowing” air accompanied by the recitation of “specific words,” human and often non-human agencies join forces to promote changes in people and the environment. This paper engages not only with the academic interest in the material intersections between language and the world (see, Cavanaugh and Shankar 2017; Keane 2008a; Wiener 2013, to name a few), but also aims to reframe the notion of “event” as a transformative and suspended encounter between human and often non-human agencies (Kapferer 2015) and thus deepen our understanding of what living relationally might entail.

No-humanos, tiempos-espacios y socialidad amazónica entre los llanchama runa del río Tiputini

Proponemos un análisis de las relaciones con la alteridad que los seres no-humanos y la selva como entidad viviente establecen con los llanchama runa del río Tiputini en la Amazonia ecuatoriana. Para desarrollar esta propuesta recogemos tres relatos que nos fueron compartidos durante nuestro trabajo de campo y que narran encuentros vivenciales entre seres humanos y no-humanos, con especial atención en las nociones de tiempo y espacio en que acontecieron. Confrontamos nuestros datos con la teoría perspectivista y las ontologías relacionales para profundizar en los modos particulares con que los humanos enfrentan los cruces de perspectivas y en la figura del chaman como mediador y restaurador de la vida cotidiana cuando esta es perturbada por los intentos predatorios de las entidades no-humanas. Veremos que los llanchama runa tratan con las agencias no-humanas empleando valores específicos, relacionales y transformadores, movilizándose en dos tiempos-espacios diferenciados y simultáneos; condición que les permite seguir existiendo y habitando la selva bajo un modelo de socialidad siempre creativo y performativo de predadores y presas.

Performance and New Materialism: Towards an expanded notion of a non-human agency

This research paper expands on new materialist notions of material agency within the context of practice-based creative research. New materialist thinking provides a recognition of the agency of non-human actors, and enables a focus on the dynamics of human and non-human relationships. A key concept of new materialist theory is a critical perspective on the binary of human and non-human, arguing that all matter resides within a form of incessant flow, in states of constant transformation. These renewed approaches to understanding matter has drawn from developments in science and physics exploring the nature of forces and networks that constitutes matter. In a world that is continuing to become more technologically reliant and scientifically developed, this research paper explores a non-human agency emerging within human and non-human interactions, where human and non-human agents (spaces, materials, forces, etc) have efficacy in the co-construction of practices, events and figurations, drawn from looking at the nature of these relationships that unfolded in the performance works. In this paper I will be discussing two performances that were undertaken Material Interactions[i] and BodyBody Experiments [ii]. Considering these works within a theoretical framework of analysis which draws from New Materialist thinking on non-human agency
 
 [i] Choat, Alyssa. Material Interactions, 2017.
 [ii] Choat, Alyssa. Bodybody Experiments, 2017.

Performance and New Materialism: Towards an expanded notion of a non-human agency

This research paper expands on new materialist notions of material agency within the context of practice-based creative research. New materialist thinking provides a recognition of the agency of non-human actors, and enables a focus on the dynamics of human and non-human relationships. A key concept of new materialist theory is a critical perspective on the binary of human and non-human, arguing that all matter resides within a form of incessant flow, in states of constant transformation. These renewed approaches to understanding matter has drawn from developments in science and physics exploring the nature of forces and networks that constitutes matter. In a world that is continuing to become more technologically reliant and scientifically developed, this research paper explores a non-human agency emerging within human and non-human interactions, where human and non-human agents (spaces, materials, forces, etc) have efficacy in the co-construction of practices, events and figurations, drawn from looking at the nature of these relationships that unfolded in the performance works. In this paper I will be discussing two performances that were undertaken Material Interactions[i] and BodyBody Experiments [ii]. Considering these works within a theoretical framework of analysis which draws from New Materialist thinking on non-human agency [i] Choat, Alyssa. Material Interactions, 2017. [ii] Choat, Alyssa. Bodybody Experiments, 2017.

Viral Vampires

Viral Vampires