Investigation 2 - Warmup Exercise

tl;dr: To help prepare for your project, develop a chart, map, or system diagram that imagines and illustrates the possible logics of your interactive experience. This exercise asks you to speculate on your end interaction, how it might be encounters and how people would experience it and talk about it. Complete this in no more than 2 hours.

Context

Many otherworldly formats for prediction and auguring have an underlying system that can be described and illustrated. This has been employed in many speculative and critical enactments.

For example, David Benqué’s draws on and revisits the cosmic spreadsheets of the Old Farmer’s Almanac (1792) as a way to explore and examine the ‘imaginary of data and prediction.’ Drawing from these forms and their logics and their aesthetics, Benqué applies them to “contemporary tools used in data science and machine learning to implement divinatory rationalities”

Similarly in a Tarot of Things, the logic, aesthetics, symbols and meanings of a deck of tarot cards are used to explore a more-than-human-centered turn on IoT objects. They say:

“Interests in divination stem from being human, and the fact that we can contemplate on our lives. But, with some apt usage of speculative design work it is possible to imagine a moment where the rise in autonomous objects may bring about considerable advances in ML to harbour divinatory guidance services for IoT devices; digital seer’s if you may. Where tarot’s simplicity works for the purposes of this research is through its inherent practice of rhetoric, with the seer tasked to ‘make sense’ of cards through their meaning associations… As tarot can be reduced to word associations with imagery, the cards enact a similar mechanic though representative of the digital world IoT objects relate with rather than human folklore.” <br/ > From Tarot of Things

This exercise will invite you to draw inspiration from these projects and they ways in which they leverage the visual language, aesthetics, symbols and logics found within rituals and practices for otherworldly fortune telling. You are asked to explore and illustrate your proposed approach by rendering a system or map of your interactive experience that draws from the aesthetics and logics of divinatory practice you are working with.

See:

• Cosmic Spreadsheets in Voss, Georgina. “Supra Systems.” (2018). https://davidbenque.com/projects/almanac/Supra_Systems_Cosmic_Spreadsheets.pdf
• Benque, D. (2020). Case board, traces, & chicanes: Diagrams for an archaeology of algorithmic prediction through critical design practice. Royal College of Art (United Kingdom).
• Lindley, Joseph, Haider Ali Akmal, and Paul Coulton. “Design research and object-oriented ontology.” Open Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2020): 11-41.

Brief

To help prepare for your project, develop a chart, map or system diagram that imagines and illustrates the possible logics of your interactive experience.

This exercise asks you to speculate on your end interaction, how it might be encounters and how people would experience it and talk about it.

This should engage the constraints of the inputs and outputs you’ve been assigned. You should also consider the aesthetics of the otherworldly practice for prediction, forecasting or auguring that you’ve employed and how you might use this to describe and illustrate your approach.

Sketch this possible approach to your creative project, in under 2 hours.

Learning Objectives

As part of this exercise you will be asked to:

• Creatively explore the possibilities for your project to get early feedback
• Gain hands on experience with methods for rendering speculative proposals and concepts
• Explore the kinds of dialog and unexpected experiences you could create through this project

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver three things for this warm up exercise:

1. Chart: Deliver an image on Slack or bring to class.
2. Narrative: A short description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed and the strategies you used.
3. Reflection: A reflection on outcome, and comparision to findings of the Petrelli paper discussed in class.

The narrative and reflection should be approx 150-200 words (max.)

Share your outcomes as a post on the #projects channel of on Slack.