24-26 April –

First Nordic

Science and Technology Studies (STS)

Conference 

Epilogue: Strong inaugural meeting of the Nordic STS conference. Jane Summerton, co-chair, was an absolutely gracious host, and delighted by our connection with Gene Rochlin, the latter now retired from Energy Resources Group, UC Berkeley, thanking her again for her edited volume back in the 1990s on large technical systems where Gene has a fabulous article on nuclear power in comparative national program perspective.  

4/25:  Merete Lie — Scale and imagination in scientific imaging. Inscription devices as mediators: interpretations based on recognition mediating among researchers to the public — manipulation has been used to make images legible, are conventions in science changing to reflect images that are immediately recognizable (colorful colors), the factual and unbiased are becoming more emotional, and what does that do to our body, at a molecular level [?] The concept of entification, Things that are becoming thingy that were once abstract. People had habits before, eating during the night, now we put a label on it, “night eater” — increased diagnosis through visualization. Cells today are getting an identity.

How cell images use the concept of “portrait”, a recognized genre in Western culture, and that they appear in the same size, sperms are very different sizes than cells, but are presented to us in the same size. Same scale, a human image, a cell, all appearing with the same background — special criteria when you choose to display a cell, color, shadow, and images are more recognizable to us, even when the content is very new to us. An emphasis on the individual in Western culture, as the proof of uniqueness.

Existence independent of the body, from cells as biological composition to autonomous entities, paving the way for commodification of cell, and a change in cultural understanding of the cell.

Anja Johansen: Becoming electricity, becoming molecular: Notions of the body in the art installation of Wave UFO.

Wave UFO, Mariko Mori, 1999-2002. Translating electrical signal into imagery.

Non evasive way of measuring brain activity by examining electricity in the skull, measuring the voltage fluctuation resulting from the ionic neurons. The method was invented and standardized during the 1920s, Hans Berger, reported observations “Das Electroencephalogram” on EEG (Electroencephalography).

Everyone has brain waves, but some make better subjects than others, and EEG only measures in the outer area.

Epilepsy diagnosis, but also gaming, related to learning, in the 1960s, alpha waves were used in experimental music, as reflected in the “brainball” game.

IBVA – Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer, geared for artists, intuitive imaging.

Art markets and the experience economy;

EEG and the visualization of the invisible;

Black-boxing/mystification of technology.

The technology opens up a more fundamental creativity, uncertainty and improvisation in music and the arts, while in science, the program is oriented toward control and predictability.

Up next — Movie: Having a skilled eye versus common sense and emotions as a rhetoric in determining meaning of the visual.

Visual styles are manipulated (photoshop) highlighting what they are looking from, using colors based on thresholds through photoshop and other programs (“ooh, that scientist just discovered that filter”) — but each school, organization or laboratory develops their own style, and the most successful images are those developed by well developed science houses, for which other seeks to replicate that style.

Manipulation and direct information.

Image competitions in science: god and bad, enhances popular reception of science but also distracts from primary scientific knowledge. “Glowing” images are important in media to represent [brain] activity. We are soaked in medical cliches, of computer generated images about the body.

Artist Andew Carnie and Scientist Richard Wingate, The Magic Forest — the very feeling of looking at the brain, peering down at the microscopic world of the brain. A program like CSI, a logical deconstruction of pathology, and the fetishization of laboratory work [movie directed by Anwar Saab on biomedical imaging].

As an aside: The representation of an industry (energy, biomedicine) as a visual impact and historical, almost cultural form.

Session 5.2
Images and narratives in climate change debates and policy

Susanna Lidstrom: Environmental ocean images, scientific, popular and political debates. The idea that the sea is remote and inaccessible, a different world; events in the sea get less attention than if they happen on land; that the ocean is so large that it can dilute anything; less research on human relations to the ocean than other environments —

Why do marine concerns receive less attention than others environmental debates? What determines levels of concern, how do scientists influence debates? What are the main attitudes that shape our understaning of the sea? How has our understanding of the sea developed in the age of environment? Which technologies enable us to know about the sea?

Invisible narratives. How do you create narratives about things you can’t see, predict, uncertain predictions, long term implications, global impacts.

The Sea: Waste and Wonder —

Aquariums, how do you showcase the ocean. Digital visualizations. 
Katarina Larsen: Narratives and images of energy behavior, consumer participation as de facto climate policy.
The power of stories (Gabriel 1998, 2004) to be tempted, seduced and deceived. Environmental futures studies and users of new technology, users and expectations about behavioral change in new technology (Larsen & Hojer 2007, Larsen et al. 2011); Consumer as self-reflecting user (of their own energy consumption); consumer as signal of new markets (renewal and diversify for niche groups); consumer as a data point (analysis of large groups of people rather than individuals); current users to identify future consumers (energy futures). Visualizations for bridging the gap between an abstract concept of climate change and everyday life, Nicholson-Cole (2005) – Interactive experience of climate change (vs energy game) — how and whether they can personally do anything about it.

Roles of users of renewables (solar) energy (a) knowledge production and new roles of customers in research and development (b) approach of workshops with solar cell owners and potential future solar cell owners, active in blogging about solar cells….

Miryase Christensen: Images of climate change policy and ice. How knowledge about climate change was produced and circulated through media, the latter central actors in relations of definition. Satellite imagery, computer technology, large scale infrastructure. Where there are hundreds of stories in the Guardian and NYTimes there was only sparse coverage in Sweden, indicating a lack of consensus in the former countries over climate change.

Elena Parmiggiani and Vidar Hepsø. Mobilizing heterogenous forces in the modeling of data: from perplexity to institutionalism.
Distribution of Lophelia corals and oil and gas operations: re-negotiating space. How can coral reefs co-exist with oil and gas, that is, how can reefs be represented to reflect risk? Why now? Meaning, now, the reefs have been taken from the dark bottoms to be represented on the computer screen, and recorded, measured, stored, in different formats, timescales.

Granting Lophelia a due process: “given a microphone to express its thoughts”; different other forces in oil and gas need to be enrolled and consulted, given weight to assess their legitimate interest; leading to a new phase or institutionalization of hierarchy.

Giving a real-time claim to Lophelia, where interests are represented indirectly — emerging information infrastructure (highly social entanglements of making Lophelia an actor), due process as a way of democratizing design and representations.

Bryan Wynn. Key Note speech: Science versus Expertise- where expertise leads toward advice in the context of decision making. Science is something else, not necessarily involved in purposeful decision making. Feels marginal to social science, because social science does not question the social end of the science – public relationships. Doing publics with science in mind. The question of science and what it has meant to mean and what meanings are given to it by various publics. We have to understand what publics experience as science and other meanings that are imposed upon on publics.

Different versions of science which are articulated and enacted in society: innocent understanding (research); new factor of production (global capitalism and economy); new factor of public authority and justification; author of public meanings (risk, security);

Science doesn’t just inform policy but legitimizes those decisions, taking on a normative role, and thus biased in favor of one outcome over another.

Science is continually acting with significant audiences in mind, imagined publics — with an eye toward establishing credibility.

4/26: Session 6. Energy as relations: knowledge practices and the environment
Lea Schick and Brit Ross Winthereik: Innovating Energy Futures: Smart Grid as Relations
Smart Grid objects. “Innovation delegation” – smooth collaboration presentation (instructions given on how to behave–seeing, interacting, connecting). Jig saw puzzle as metaphor of putting pieces in alignment. Diagram –“display of the relations between forces which constitute power. … it is a machine that is almost blind and mute even though it makes others see and speak” (Deleuze 1991:31).

Sensibility to non-discursive visual apparatuses of innovating futures (saying); Models for future diagrams-governing architectural arrangements (user inscription; Locate innovation as emerging in inter-subjective and inter-objective relations; Diagrams of innovation and imagination).

Two smart grid objects: Systems’s Worlds & Nodes in a Network. M. Foucault. “…Manet makes representation visible to itself. In so doing he also makes subjectivity visible to itself at the same time” (Hetherington 2011:468). [subject and object]

Question about gender.

B.R. Winthereik and Laura Watts: Cutting Edges: Place and futures in marine renewable energy
Alien energy. Wave resource distribution. A non-place for future making in typically future making terms. Peripherality part of the branding efforts, “World’s end — and therefore a place for new beginnings”, “a remote area” — multiple ontologies, center-periphery rules out worlds that are not the same deep down. Taking seriously lives at a dead end.

Cemetery with lights. Peripheries and particularities. European Marine Energy Center — creating Center’s elsewhere. Center versus institute [?]. Far from the center in so many ways that matter. Transduction: transformation of matter from one matter to another. Human actors and nature enter into relations that have agentive affects — edge is a type of instrument.

The materiality of edge [or as material semiotic]. Working the world analytically. Crown and local ownership. Orkney waves, electrons, and local ownership.

A cultural experience. Watching waves so long they begin to run into the opposite direction from land to sea. [Italo Calvino, Reading a Wave] unable to analyze/read a wave into universal knowledge. Creating a tool for analyzing particularities.

A: Not able to generalize, but not willing either. Threshold — edge brings to mind the concept of threshold, and thus, that which has potential and not spent.

James Maguire: Icelandic Energy Transitions: from natural resources to energy politics
Energetic Cityscapes and landscapes, inverse NIMBY, visibility and energy embeddedness, ownership and aesthetics. Renewables energy for megaprojects (aluminum bauxite mined from S.A. with fossil fuels) + The Green Cloud, data service sites [how dirty is your data]. Reconfiguration about privacy under consideration by parliament in light of energetic development — attract and reconfigure what is going on. What types of politics are performed in renewable energy worlds?