Notes from Nov 12, 2015
James P. Ascher
Meeting started, without notes 2015-11-11T8:56-05
sorry, that’s my fault, I just volunteered; present: Purdom, Jeremy, Scott, Ammon, Ethan, Lydia, Bremen, James (taking notes)
Notes start 9:18 AM
Administrative things
JPA wants talk about tracking
JPA discusses project
PL mentions that people being around change how time happen; clouds and traffic; cities change the speed; thinking about people as heart-cells; it’s like clocks; micro-expressions too;
pauses in conversation
an article, native American community in Canada: Euro-Canadians (in scare quotes?); job interviews; didn’t respond as quickly as the Canadian administrators, so would never get the job; rude northerners; article on New York Jewish conversation?
TODO Lydia and Bremen: post two article, New York Jewish conversation, native Canadians
on the interview
presumptions about that kind of space; meta-communicative frame; not just about eliciting information, it’s also about the setup; setting up an interview is not a neutral way of getting information; meaningfully generative ass;
/Lipstick Traces/
if you want, read it to finish by Thanksgiving; a secret history: alternate timeline; not the normal politics? all through the Sex Pistols; popular and novelty- kid in the mall with the Mohawk haircut; Sex Pistols still throws shade- Guy Debord; deep chronology; Frankfurt School as mass culture
Phillip K. Dick Man in the High Castle
diaries written by student soldiers
1/3 were students from the most elite universities; exceptionally well-read: understood the Japanese and Western canon; kept really extensive diaries about time and meaning and purpose; how time stretches out and constricts; lamenting immanent death; people who could understand how the west and east works; ideas of honor, enmeshed; if you’re captured, you kill yourself; interesting personal and meta-view; completely aware that the states is deploying all this symbolism, they could understand but couldn’t get out of it; culture of resisting it is impossible; would bring harm to their families
TODO Purdom will post the titles and try to decide if it’s worth doing more
Kamikaze, Cherry Blossom, and Nationalism; and diary translations
sitting quietly, looking at kids in Yellowstone
Lydia tracked music (active engagement)
the active engagement was a bust: there must have been music playing in the grocery store, but didn’t remember; looking for how long she was sleeping and her heart-rate: active minutes per day (automatically collected); doesn’t do anything with it; pay $50 for fancy graphs; number of hours slept, average heart-rate, how many miles walked; number of active minutes: heart rate above normal for 10 minutes or longer; days that did yoga; no relationship between anything that she could find; maybe do it longer? look at a larger set of data? keeping a journal? interested in relationships between physical, sleep, heart-rate; average is 60; making a graph: using online things- some are in hours, some are in others; searched Google, used whatever came up first, but got frustrated; asked for support from friends over Skype; want to do another one-week tracking thing; outcome based; wasn’t changing anything, behaving as normal; baseline
Gillette did exposure to the sun? vitamin D?
Old Faithful!
Bremen amount of times changing activities, changing focus
sort of a nightmare in terms of tracking; tick-tick-tick-tick-tick; every time reading something for linguistics, thinking about something to alternatively do; a micro-tracking exercise, spaces within a specific conversation; paces that happen within a 10 minute interaction; want to track smaller time; tracking film editing; ways of deciding how you cut a particular piece of footage; if you watch an hour of footage, and cut it different ways; what is the productive potential of that kind of process, for material you know very well; productive potential inherent in both; some kind of measure of a normal ten minutes; compare them- police interrogation; how those expand out; slow mode in writing: can take forever, this can be done in writing; to slow down time you write more stuff; segment of ten minutes; footing: when you’re speaking to someone- it’s not about the words, but the codes in the posture; within a ten minute interaction, who gets the word; posture, tone, style cues; footing- it’s about stage position; Irving Goffman talks about footing; Genette, grandfather of narrative theory; LeBeouf: interviewing young black children in Harlem- scariest moment in your life: linguistic reason that these stories are compelling- linguistic strategies; Frank Kermode; looking for when analyzing music- words don’t have value in the analysis typically (maybe a joke?); there are micro-schools of thought;
can we do a ten minute interaction
a lot was going on; capture: makerspace project- Becca posted to FB, arduinos on people’s feet; how are we in-sync or out-of-sync; amazingly beautiful project where a director animated the staging cues for choreography; recording things; painting the horse as they see it;
Ethan’s tracking
cameras finally seeing things that humans can; prosthetics- two eyes, five senses; more granularity of things, we can see things that we couldn’t previously see; trying to think about how our sensory perceptions of time day-to-day, not how physicist think we move through time; flat space-time, you’re a line segment: in a four dimensional space; flow through time- have no idea why we see time that way; defamiliarize the sense of time, of one thing that happens one after it, things happen in a different order, both can be right; trying to think of time happening for things that aren’t humans; obsessed with stuff; think about as much stuff as he could: how do the gym shorts experience time? listed every single thing that he interacted with every single day; sidewalks and streets; whatever seemed intuitive; wrote to thousand things down- on your shoulders all day; such a relief to stop; more hours would go by; had to remember everything that he touched; less human way of thinking about time; a couple of animations that touch on this, someone going through their day: explode it out to a graph of where it comes from; less human? linked to English scholarship, eco-crit; beyond human scale- construct representation; hyperobjects; post-humanism; deconstruction too, critiques of metaphysics; all of philosophy is anthropomorphic and ethnocentric; dark mountain project- collective that is trying to represent big time: clock that every hundred years it moves for a second; general thrust; not perfect; unnatural defenses article; thinking about the ways that objects are connected to climate change: intentionality- global warming; coconut oil->torture->global warming; last of inktober, when stuff breaks- a second life of books when something breaks; lifespan for broken shoes: batteries have different life spans; post-human scope- very human; not how space time actually is, causality still exists; things influence each other; Appalachian Junkumentary: Jacob Young talks about junk-yards, no we are salvage yards, some take pride in not crushing the cars; recycling centers- different laws that regulate; salvage- new laws about recycling and toxic waste; new laws about what you can do on your land; going there to get parts- junkyards; how people position themselves- “you can buy a new car here” but they can’t keep up with regulations; leaking oil in a corn field, lady can’t get a carburetor; eminence- you are part of something which is global warming or global capital
time scale of observation
only in the aggregate that weather is the climate; moths have changed colors, white to grey; trying to see something bigger: China Miéville- three points at an explosion: ice bergs in the sky in London, coral reef along Berlin wall;
TODO post and assign the reading from CM, from Purdom
citizen scientist projects
Cornell bird project; backyard bird count; all the people who are interested in how many birds in the backyard; central database about migratory patterns;