Seminar Blogs
“Reading Foucault’s Governmentality through Design” – Mavi Irmak Karademirler
Adam Nocek at the latest TİM seminar provided us with a close reading of Foucault’s dispositif and explained how and why design is helpful when reformulating Foucault’s concept of governmentality. The talk divided into four sections. In the last section “Xeno Design,” Nocek explained the place of design in the context of governmentality as he…
Read more“Playing with strings: conceptual material, connected design” – Jose Hopkins Brocq
Playing with concepts, when we trace lines between them, new possibilities are drawn from the spaces these lines shape. As ideas are being connected, strings become cables and lines; connectors and limits. In this sense, to play with concepts is to connect them, while creating intermediate spaces of new relational possibilities. This process of thinking…
Read more“Does Design Allow for True Emergence?” – Dennis Jansen
Emergence is the manifestation of a property of an object, phenomenon or system, not by virtue of any single one of its parts possessing that property, but through the coming-together and interaction of its different constituting elements. Through emergence, a phenomenon becomes truly “more than the sum of its parts” (Holland 1997, 32). For example,…
Read more“The state is not a cold monster, the state is the art of the thaumaturges” – Laura Jimenez Rojas
On this occasion at the TiM seminar we had the opportunity to come closer to the lure of Whitehead from a very new perspective. Adam Nocek introduced the framework of speculative design as an interdisciplinary approach to think of the circular processes in which lifeworlds and humans constitute each other. To start, it is important…
Read more“I sweep as my mother swept; therefore, my mother sweeps as I am” – Jose Hopkins Brocq
Grabbing a broom and sweeping the floor is a simple and determined action. It is easy to place it in time and space. Then, sweeping the floor is an action like any other. Nevertheless, it is an action that is unique and universal, historical and forgettable, present and ubiquitous. Sweeping is an action that mimics…
Read more“Skilled Practice, Merging Thinking with Doing” – Mavi Irmak Karademirler
After the last Transmission of Motion seminar with Tim Ingold, I was left with a vivid picture of him, as he described his experience of playing the cello. His talk revolved around the notions of experience, creativity, and habit to question the differences of bodily automatisms and skilled craft. To understand the differences between habitual…
Read more“What to do with the ‘doing undergoing’?” – Gido Broers
Let me start by saying that Tim Ingold gave an interesting talk – “On doing undergoing: Experience, Imagination and the Principle of Habit” – about what it means to do something habitually and to master a certain skill, which also raises more general questions about attention & intention, embodiment and cognitive systems. For Ingold, doing…
Read more“Embodied Literacy, Skill, and Habit” – Dennis Jansen
Lately, I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the embodied aspects of digital games and digital gameplay. If Brendan Keogh (2018) is to be believed, we cannot truly understand how we perceive and make sense of games without taking into account the fact that we are directing our eyes at the screen, aiming our ears at…
Read more“From Linelanders to Geographers of Thought” – Laura Jimenez Rojas
The first TiM session of 2019 had a great beginning. The guest was the anthropologist Tim Ingold. The talk was about “On Doing Undergoing: experience, imagination and the principle of habit”. We had the opportunity to have a glimpse of Ingold’s phenomenological approach in the context of his “dwelling perspective”. The guiding question for this session was:…
Read more“My mother against a mouse: thoughts about haptic devices” – Jose Hopkins Brocq
When I was 12, I remember my mother having problems to interact with our computer. She constantly complained about the problems she had with her eye-hand coordination when it came to moving the cursor or pointer. In other words, she had problems with the mouse. Looking back, I could now assume her discomfort was caused…
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