4. DESARROLLO DE LA METODOLOGÍA
4.1 DIAGNÓSTICO DE LA NORMA SGE 21: 2008
4.3.3 ESTUDIO ADMINISTRATIVO
4.3.3.4 DESCRIPCIÓN Y PERFIL DE CARGOS
While it is fairly accepted to claim that things affect things materially (this is, after all, why
they are useful), Bennett likewise notes “the
capacity of things… to impede or block the
will and designs of humans” with a “not-quite- human capaciousness”57 that is independent
from subjectivity. The material of things can act against people or independently from
57. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii; 3.
58. Katherine N. Hayles, “Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari,”
SubStance 94/95 (2001): 150. Hayles is speaking here of Richard Dawkin’s conception of agency in The Selfish Gene.
people as well as for them; in this sense,
material shows an efficacy independent from the subject. Such a material efficacy can be
found when the remote control no longer changes the television channel or when the computer suddenly displays a blue screen of death – these are signs that the screen is no longer working for the human.
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Reflexivity and reciprocity
The adaption of reflexivity as a material
capacity provides a greater challenge. The
capacity for reflection is strongly linked
to subjectivity. Coole remarks that the
transpersonal domain is reflexive in the sense that it shows “a certain… interiority, where collective life turns back on itself.”59 Agential
matter, then, should be able to ‘turn back on itself’ to contribute to its context in a way that creates interiority.
Daniel Rozin’s series of works Mechanical Mirrors demonstrates such an understanding
of materiality reflexivity. Rozin’s earliest piece
in the series, the Wooden Mirror (1999) relies
on the reflection of light on a tilting plane to
compose an image. A series of wooden tiles organised in an array are connected to motors
which tilt them up and down to reflect an
external light source. A camera mounted in the front of the mirror feeds an image to an external processor, which is processed into greyscale and mapped to an angle, so that white pixels correspond to a thirty degree tilt upwards toward a light source, and black pixels to a thirty degree tilt downward and away from the light source.60 The resultant image is mediated specifically by the timber’s
materiality: its ability to cast shadow and
reflect light, as well as the natural colour and size of the wooden pixels, affect the fidelity of
the image. Rozin has translated this system into other materials, all of which mediate the
image differently. PomPom Mirror (2015),
one of the most recent of the set, relies on the
compressibility of wool to pull black and beige
“fur” pixels past each other. The resultant
image is of a different kind because the materiality of the pixel is distinctly different. Although these pieces are called ‘mirrors’ they
are not reflective in the traditional sense. Yet,
the person interacting with these mirrors is shown to themselves in a way that is translated
by the specific materiality of the pixel and the
workings of the system behind it. In separating what is received from what is displayed, the system turns back to itself to present a person to themselves in a different material form. The mirror’s turn back into its context generates new capacities of action – people test their movements against the mirror, and in turn the mirror recomposes their movements in wood
or fur. The mechanical mirrors see and reflect
upon the materiality of bodies by reciprocating those bodies with their pixel’s materiality. The mirror reciprocates the action of the person with its own action.61
59. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 140.
60. Rozin discusses the technological system behind the mirrors in a video entitled “Interactive art with wooden mirrors’, accessed 30 August 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BZysu9QcceM.
61. Reciprocity of action lends a particular reading to the ability of things to turn back on themselves, but the generation of action from action is well noted. Grosz conceives of freedom as the “the ability to act and in acting to make oneself even as one is made by external forces.” Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics ed. Dianna Coole and Samantha Frost (London: Duke University Press, 2010), 142. In doing so, she identifies a multidirectional role in acting and being acted upon, making and being made. Allen notes similar themes of reciprocity in the agencies of Foucault and Arendt; and Bennett discusses the same in Deleuze’s work.
The kind of material reciprocity shown in
Rozin’s work constitutes a reflexive turn in the
sense that it ensures that anything that acts is also, simultaneously, acted upon. Reciprocity ensures that actions are, in a sense, never
without consequences – that a system that acts
towards its environment is always acted back at. The contextual changes that arise from this dual action affect the possibilities for further
action. In this sense, reciprocity can define a material reflexivity: actions made turn back
on themselves by altering their environments, affecting the scope for further action.
Motivation and directedness
The last of Coole’s agentic capacities, motivation, is usually considered in terms of will or intent when linked to the subject. In her analysis, Coole states that, although the transpersonal domain does not show intent in the individualised sense of the word, it
does show a “contingent sens because it is an intersubjective domain where desires and
refusals meld and congeal.”62 She uses the
term ‘sens’ to mean a form of direction or directedness. Although Coole’s trans-personal domain does not display a cogent or singular intent, it is directed towards certain actions and aims. Within the material realm, a similar directedness could be found in a form of material intentionality.
Don Ihde discusses the material directedness of technologies in terms of technological intentionality, saying that “technologies, by
providing a framework for action, do form
62. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 140.
63. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 141. 64. D. R. Wier, “Light Shows: A Kinetic Art Technique Using
Chemicals,” Leonardo 2, no. 3 (July 1969): 254.
intentionalities and inclinations within which
use-patterns take dominant shape.”63 Although
Ihde applies technological intentionality toward the use context, the statement indicates that technological intentionality arises from a form of material directedness.
Wier, for example, introduces a screen with
specific material directedness in a 1969 issue
of Leonardo. Wier describes a kinetic art
technique based on chemicalical interactions, in which a watch glass containing a “starting solution” is placed on an overhead projector.
The starting solution is slowly infused with various chemical solutions which, when interacting, produce coloured patterns. These patterns are projected onto a white wall as a moving image. Wier’s screen and its effects
rely on the specific material directedness of
the chemicals used and the relations between them. As Wier states, knowledge of chemistry is essential to the operating of his screen:
“an operator should… learn the nature of the
chemical reactions that can occur between the starting solution and reactive additives, in order to choose the type of effects he wishes
to produce.”64 As the chemical reactions take
place, motion is generated within the solution, creating a screening that is intensely material.
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“If the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the
potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel
does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No- he shapes the void… From start
to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a
containing vessel.”
Martin Heidegger67
“There are many practical and conceptual obstacles here: How can communication proceed when many members are nonlinguistic? Can we theorise more closely the various forms of such communicative energies? How can humans learn to hear or enhance our receptivity for ‘propositions’ not expressed in words?
Jane Bennett68 Things exhibit their own intentionalities. But if the design process is predicated by designer intent, how can design access the intentionalities of things? How can I start at the end of a process of materialisation, with a sedimented idea of the object and its use, and work in to the relational field?
It is difficult to access this momentary field, these relations in flux, which may be in contrast with the reflexive relata. The role of design and the intent of the designer are challenged by such an aim. Perhaps the best I can do is negotiate – recognise the unintended as the thing designing back, communicate with the developing object as it brings itself about.
Making with Arduino is like communicating with the thing as it develops. A text-based interface is provided for carrying meaning between human and microchip with a grammatical structure similar to that of human- human languages; where individual morphemes are combined into statements according to a syntax. The microchip performs acts of semantic translation on this communication to carry it forward to networked components, using fluctuations in voltage over time to ‘read’ and ‘write’, producing action and information.
Unintentful design
65. The affordance framework discussed in chapter one shows
how material directedness of things can be co-opted for
human purposes, to expand and alter human capacities for action.
66. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139. 67. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” 167.
68. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 104.
Determining agency
Material directedness is not necessarily at
odds with human intentionality.65 Having
shown confluences between the embodiment
and the object as recognitions of materiality or placedness, Merleau Pontys description
of morticity or pre-reflexive movement as “original intentionality”66 makes clear that
bodies, too, show material directedness. Bodies are composed in a certain way that renders them directed toward certain things
prior to reflection.
If material agentic capacities are considered in
terms of efficacy, reciprocity and directedness;
it becomes possible to see the screen as an agentic thing. This agentic screen is not
considered as ethicopolitcal structure, but as
a form of material efficacy. That is, it is not the sociopolitical consequences of its actions
that are under consideration, but the material
consequences of those actions. Agency, in
this sense, is contingent not only on the material, but on differences in materiality. Such an approach separates any resultant agency—as—relatum from belonging purely to the domain of the subject. It allows material agency to be revealed, but it does not disallow a subject-bound agency from appearing. In other words, the process of agentialisation arises across a difference in material directedness,
generating reflexive things that are considered
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These communications are not hierarchical and unidirectional. The microchip is not the mediator between the human’s intentionality and the action performed: human to microchip to components. The communication between microchip and components (which can be both written to and read from) is not so clearly directional. The language of effect, whose morphemes are voltage and time as well as words, lies between components and microchip. Action too carries meaning that feeds back in to the communication process, between actuator and designer. Words, voltage and action become morphemes form a system of communication in which spatial effects occur.
Coming to know the machinic syntax, and the ways in which meaning is produced using it, is a process of actively listening to machinic intentionality. Not a (human) design intent, but its ways of doing, its ways of communicating. This syntax is clearly directed toward the world in a particular way, a way that I have to come to understand. The links between basic units of meaning; words, voltage and action; are left exposed in the Arduino interface. Mistranslation can occur. These are not distinct and defined entities – human, microchip, component– using three distinct communication systems. They are a material directedness. In the iterative process of designing with Arduino; actions, electron differentials and words are all instructions and effects. Humans, microchips and components are all effectors, translators and mediators.
Although not entirely grounded in the agency of material, Takayama’s discussion of agency in human-robot interactions might show how such a nonhuman agency could be recognised. Takayama approaches object agency as a
quality held in immediate, “in-the-moment”69 human perception; not as an intrinsic quality
of the object itself, nor as a summative or
reflexive meaning that informs the conditions
of possibility of an object. She states that it is the perception or recognition of agency
that influences a person’s actions toward an
object regardless of the existence of agency as such. Such an approach suffers from the assumption that agency is something granted by an individual subject rather that being itself generative of subjectivity. Takayama seems to note this in denouncing ontology, stating that
“while it is possible to argue at length about
the ontological status of an entity’s agency, it
is also possible to define agency as something
that is perceived.”70 Despite addressing
agential materiality through subjectivity,
Takayama’s approach indicates a reflexive
overwriting of experience, where objects
reacted to “in the moment” as if agentic will later be denied agency in reflexive thought.
She seems to recognise agentic material
capacities, even if they are subsequently overwritten by reflexive human intent. The reflexive process that Takayama posits can be
likened to the process of determining relata. If, before this moment, agential material may be recognised, and afterward it may not be, this is the moment in which agency is determined as the property of a relatum. It thus also corresponds to the moment at which the subject and object are determined as relata, as being able to hold properties.
Before this moment of reflexive thought, the
subject and object are indeterminate and agency remains as an ongoing process in
which efficacy, reciprocity and directedness
are differentiating into entities.
The subject-like agency of things is demonstrated well by Random International’s
Audience (2008). The installation suspends the
moment of finding the subject and the object
even as the subject is presented to themselves.
The piece is composed of a “horde” of small mirrors, arranged at floor height on metal
feet and motors that allow the mirror face to 69. Leila Takayama, “Perspectives on Agency Interacting with and through Personal Robots” in Human-Computer Interaction: The Agency Perspective, ed. Marielba Zacarias and José Valente de Oliveira (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 196.
tilt and turn. Without a human interactant, the mirrors move in a seemingly unorganised fashion. As a person approaches, motion tracking software informs each mirror of their position, and each mirror turns to focus on the person. The movement includes the titling of the plane toward the person’s face, so that the person is confronted with their own image at a variety of distances.
Audience allows the human interactant to
see themselves reflected even as they are reminded of what is doing the reflecting –
linking the image of the self to the object. The
“inquisitive, synchronised gesture” with which
all the mirrors turn at once toward the person,
and their smooth “sense of abstracted, human- like behaviour”71 suggest an efficacy and
directedness; and the individuality with which they react to the person as their focus suggests a sense of material reciprocity. The Audience
expresses a subject-like agency. This agency is not properly located within any of the mirrors, nor perhaps in the mirrors as a whole, but somewhere behind what might otherwise have become the subject and the object. Although the human is presented to themselves as the focus in becoming the subject of the artwork, they come to objectify themselves within their own gaze. The mirrors in this context cannot wholly be seen as objects, either, as they have
borrowed the gaze of the viewer, who “becomes
the subject of their own gaze and that of the
artwork.”72 The effectiveness of Audience as
a performance lies in its ability to suspend
the moment of subject-object collapse. Agency 71. Random International, “Audience,” accessed August 30 2017, https://random-international.com/work/audience/ 72. Random International, “Audience.”
is revealed here as a non-directional process that can reveal an agential object as well as an agential subject.
Materiality agency and the body
In the sense that the screen arises from generative material and agential relations, it is not something which stands against a person as an object against a subject; rather it arises with the subject, and does so in a way as to highlight situatedness. Although the determination of subject and object is an unavoidable, if complex, perceptual process,
it is also reflexive – based on a process of finding agencies across differences of
material capacities. The screen surfaces as new possibilities for action in space become apparent, agencies that are themselves contingent on the material capacities of the particular screen. These agencies not only
influence how the screen appears and is
negated by the materialities it produces, but
also how the efficacies and materialities of the
person appear within the relation.
The material agencies of the screen appear similarly to a person’s embodiment – as a certain directedness in generating material and agencial relations – only to be overwritten
later by a reflexive object called a ‘screen’. In this sense, there is a directedness or fixity belonging to each screen which influences
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The surface of the screen as a hybrid material ... renders and accrues the discontinuity of time, the surface gives us back not only the experience of temporality but of subjectivity, and that such a space of experience is a foundation of the materiality of
media.
Giuliana Bruno74 What are the material intentionalities of screens? Each screen has a different material, a different way of coming about. Can there be something in common to these materials that reveals a directedness?
Screens are spatial, they are directed toward space. But they are, more particularly, a recognition of a difference in space, a spatial difference that they are intimately connected to. The screen, in use, remaps distance, time and materiality. But this use is indicative of a particular directedness, a particular intentionality
towards the ordering of space.
Moubie orders space within a repetition of time. He sees and displays in regular cycles. His ordering of space is bound to his pace, and this reveals space as it is for-Moubie, a space screened through Moubie’s pace. His reordering of space, then, is bound not only in his seeing but in his processing and communicating. Gaze